


Unquiet

by ealcynn



Series: The Hollows [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Awesome Sam Wilson, Blood and Injury, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Depression, Dissociation, Food Issues, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), Identity Issues, Language Barrier, Mental Health Issues, Nonverbal Communication, Panic Attacks, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Speech Disorders, Standard Winter Soldier Warnings, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicidal Thoughts, Swearing, Violence, Vomiting, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:20:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23837455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ealcynn/pseuds/ealcynn
Summary: Sam knows if anyone is not to blame for this clusterfuck, it’s Barnes. He’s a victim in all this. A murderous, terrifying, weaponized, six-foot, 260-pound cyborg victim.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson
Series: The Hollows [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1717624
Comments: 96
Kudos: 316





	1. Asset

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the Hollows! This is my brand new series of post-Winter Soldier recovery fics that will eventually be a Civil War fix-it. I know everyone and their dog has written a post-WS fic by now - I started writing this series about six years ago before Age of Ultron even came out, but you might have noticed that I tend to be a slow worker. I also distinctly remember swearing that I would never post WIP again, but at least Books 1 and 2 are done, and as they say, two out of three ain't bad...  
> I'm intending to update on a weekly basis to try and finish Book 3. Please head the warnings; more will be added later in the series. 
> 
> Beta'd for me by [Percygranger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Percygranger/pseuds/Percygranger) and [Lightsider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightsider/pseuds/Lightsider). They deserve so much thanks. All mistakes are mine.

The Soldier's programming has failed. 

The clear, precise orders the Soldier should be following are little more than white noise in its head now, broken strings of unfinished coding. The Asset puts its back to the burning wrecks sinking into the river and walks away. It doesn’t look back. Why would it? It follows the riverbank. Walks. Doesn’t think. There is a complaint of malfunction from the metal arm, and in the torso. Right knee. Flesh shoulder. Maintenance required. Med tech required. The Asset slams the flesh shoulder into a tree trunk and the joint pops back into place. Minimal function is restored. 

It reaches a road. No Handlers appear. They are supposed to take it to a base for processing. The Soldier needs orders. 

It waits in the tree line. No Handlers appear. 

It has lost all of its firearms and only has two blades left. The arm needs maintenance. The Asset must be debriefed. Maintained. Repaired. Retrained. Punished if necessary for any behavioural abnormalities - it is highly likely that this will be considered necessary. Then, at last, it will be returned to the ice. The Asset is ready but no-one comes. 

Old programming comes online. Default protocols. In the event of loss of all Handlers, the Asset will report to the nearest high-ranking HYDRA personnel. The Asset was taken to see Secretary Pierce in a residence in this city; that much information slips through the wipe. But not the location. That is gone. It can’t find Secretary Pierce’s house without coordinates, an address, landmarks.

Cars with blue lights scream by. Law enforcement. Fire trucks. Dark green military vehicles. Sirens pulse nauseatingly; overhead is the throbbing whir of helicopter blades. The Soldier is too exposed here. There’s no cover here so no Handlers will come. Another protocol initiates in the Soldier’s brain – a list of safe houses. It had heard the Handlers being told not to return the Asset to the Base 52C7, the base in Washington. The next nearest safe house is B5274, on the outskirts of a city called Philadelphia. It will go there.

The Asset moves north and east on foot, travelling by night, evading the blue lights and the military vehicles. Keeping to the shadows and roofs in the towns and then, when the houses fade away, to the fields.

It keeps moving for three more nights, seeking out deep cover during the day. The safehouse is still a long way off and the Asset is slowing down. The need for maintenance is increasing; the body it wears feels strange, uncoordinated. It needs the Handlers. 

A civilian vehicle is parked at the edge of the dark highway. Figure standing at the side of the tarmac, back to the road. Urinating. Another figure in the driver’s seat, looking at a handheld communications device, drinking from a bottle. It’s the work of a moment to incapacitate the standing man; he’s untrained, distracted, blind to the Soldier stepping out of the shadows behind him. The man falls to the ground silently. The one in the car doesn’t even look up. The Soldier pulls him out of the car and punches him until he stops moving. The Soldier drags the men out into the fields and leaves them in a ditch. It gets into the driver’s seat of the car and that’s when it feels something. A fleeting sensation for the first time. Panic. The vehicle is full of gadgets, lights, buttons. It can’t remember if it knows how to drive. 

The Asset looks down. Sees the handheld device, a cell phone, and a container in the footwell; the civilian had been drinking from it. The Soldier knows this body requires sustenance. It has experienced several unexpected shutdowns since its Handlers disappeared which indicates it has been several days since it received any nutrition. There is a cramping pain in its stomach and limbs; a distant memory tells it fluids may help. It drinks the entire bottle; the brown liquid tastes of sickly sweet chemicals and tingles oddly in the mouth. The Soldier feels clearer. It lets its hands move and doesn’t think. Metal fingers fumble the keys but the car starts and the Soldier finds that it does know how to operate the vehicle after all, even if it does not remember that.

The small computer in the dashboard gives the Soldier its orders. It follows them, driving slowly and carefully. In 2.3 hours the Soldier arrives in the city. It abandons the car in the city outskirts when it runs out of fuel and takes to the rooftops. It locates Safe House B5274 somehow, and scouts it out from an adjacent rooftop for 10 hours and forty-seven minutes. Both its hands itch for a rifle. There’s no activity. 

When it’s fully dark, the Asset goes in. No Handlers are there to meet it, no Secretary Pierce and no STRIKE teams. The place is evacuated, cleared out. Just dust and echoes. The Asset searches the building top to bottom but there is nothing left. The location must have been compromised. The low treacherous thrum of panic is back and the Soldier feels its lung function decrease. It breathes slowly, and on a slow exhale remembers a secure place – there is a wall on the second floor that can be broken. The metal fist makes piecemeal of the plasterboard, and in the void behind is a box. The box contains a SIG-Sauer P220ST with three clips, a radio, a set of passports with no photos, and two tracking dots that can be operated by cell phone. Nothing else. The radio is dead when the Soldier tries it.

The Asset takes the gun and the tracking dots and abandons the safe house. Leaves the city and goes to ground in an empty factory on the outskirts. Then the Soldier just stops. The orders have run out. No Handlers have come. It has reported to the nearest safe house and no-one was there to receive it. The orders have run out. 

The Asset goes into another unscheduled shutdown and when it reboots, it is lying on the hardwood floor and there is daylight outside the boarded up windows. It has been in low power mode for hours. Vulnerable. Anything could have happened. The building it is hiding inside is still empty, however; the factory must be abandoned. The Asset stands up to go to the window, but black specks swarm across its vision and without warning it shuts down again. This time the restart takes only a few seconds but it is disconcerting. Alarming. There is  _ pain _ in the body. Throbbing in its head. Heavy and crushing in its chest beneath the arm, sparking with electricity up the metal limb. Cramping and urgent in its belly, throat, mouth. The flesh limbs shake. The Soldier finds a hose connected to a tap that still operates and drinks water until it is sick, and then drinks some more. The ache in its head and throat lessens but the stomach cramps remain. It is the body’s warning klaxon, reminding the Asset that it still needs nutrients to function. Water alone is not enough - the body requires significant caloric intake to sustain activity over such a long period of time if it is not to be returned to the ice. But the Asset doesn’t eat. It has never eaten. It is a machine. On missions it drinks nutrients from a bottle that a Handler gives it. When it is at a base, the Med techs recharge its biological systems with tubes into its nose or stomach. But now there is no one to connect up the feeding tube. There is no feeding tube. There is no food.

It was last fed at Base 52C7. The Ideal Federal Savings Bank; those words had been set into the floor in polished stone. The Asset had heard the Handlers being told not to bring it back to Base 52C7. The Handlers and agents often talk about the Asset while it is present, as if it is incapable of understanding them. As if they can shut it down with their inattention. But they trained it to infiltrate and record. To remember. It is not incapable of understanding, and when they let it, it remembers. The order not to return to Base 52C7 was an order for the Handlers, not for the Asset. The Asset can return there and not technically be in violation of an order. Then the body can be fed. 

That conclusion makes the Soldier’s brain feel odd, like what the fizzy brown liquid did to its tongue. Even if it isn’t disobeying, this course of action still  _ feels _ like defiance. The threat of punishment hangs over its head. Its heart beats faster and its breath gathers in close at the base of the throat. 

It can do this. Go back to Washington. The Soldier thinks of the sirens and the tanks and helicopters it left behind. Law enforcement and military. They might be searching for the Asset and there may be pictures of the face now it had fought without a mask. That is a tactical problem. The Soldier does not want to be seen. The combat gear is no longer conducive to that goal. Now it must fully infiltrate into the populace, pass unseen amongst the regular civilians, if it is to reach Base 52C7 without assistance. 

The Soldier searches the abandoned building and finds a room full of lockers. There are some clothes. A fluorescent yellow vest with reflective patches, dark blue overalls, brown boots. They smell of dust and old places. The overalls are large and they go on over its combat gear and the tac harness. The arm barely fits. If the Soldier has to fight, movement will be compromised. There are no gloves to hide the metal hand but in another locker there is a box labelled  _ First Aid _ . Inside is a roll of bandage, yellowed with age. The Asset winds the strip of cloth down from the elbow to the wrist and around metal fingers. That will also compromise the limb’s dexterity but at the moment concealment is more important to survival. The Asset is uncertain about the vest; it looks as if it will draw attention. But it is part of this uniform so perhaps omitting it will draw more attention still. It puts the vest on. It leaves the boots. 

Even if the Asset could recall where it left the car it used, it would be too risky to go back there again. The vehicle was a recent model; no doubt it had a tracker installed. No use to it now. Instead, it goes out into the street and walks into the city, following the flow of civilians towards a rail station. 

The Soldier is accustomed to looks of terror on the faces of its missions when they first see it, but no-one gives it a glance now. Even in the bright vest, it seems to be invisible. Despite that, the Soldier despises the crowd, too alert and tense under the potential scrutiny of so many people. There had been no mask in the workman’s locker, nor hat to shade its face. Anyone might see it. The Asset keeps its head low. It has observed three law enforcement vehicles in the streets already, passing by. Outside the rail station itself are eight men in uniforms emblazoned with the letters PPD; all are armed with Glock handguns. Police. The Asset puts its head down and slips past them. None of the police look up. 

The station itself is tactically unsound. Too many exits and access routes. Bad sightlines. Too many civilians. The echo of loud speakers and screech of machinery. The Asset has to stand in a shadowed corner for a while and just concentrate on levelling out the buzz of noise in its skull, on its erratic breathing, before it can proceed. The body is failing. It’s been out of the ice too long.

There is a barrier across the walkway to the platforms blocked by small gates. The Soldier observes the other civilians using small cards to pass through. Tickets. The barriers are ineffective; the Asset could just as easily tear the gates off as jump the barrier. But the armed men, the PPD, are watching, and it does not want to draw any attention. It keeps the metal hand in its pocket, around the barrel of the gun. 

The Soldier needs a ticket. It watches a civilian using a credit card to get a ticket using an automated machine. It lifts the wallet and cellphone out of the civilian’s coat as he passes; the man doesn’t even notice the Asset and walks away, ignorant of the theft. The Soldier is briefly baffled by the ticket machine. It has a flat screen with no buttons and is full of flashing, glaring lights and colours and coded orders that don’t make sense. A voice nearby says;

“Hey. You wanna hurry up? Some of us got places to be.”

It is a female civilian. 52kg, 1.58m, blue hair, piercings, tattoos. Not armed. Standing with weight all on the front leg, not combat trained. She would offer no difficulties; the Asset could kill her so silently that even the crowds around them would not see her fall. The metal hand hidden in the Asset’s pocket scrunches into a fist. The Asset stares and then looks back to the machine.

“You need some help?” The female asks. Her voice is now softer, the Asset is not sure why. There was a question; it is supposed to respond to questions.

“The machine.” The Soldier says. The voice that comes out is rough, barely audible, but it thinks the language is right. “I need...ticket. I don’t...”

“Here,” The civilian says, and leans in. The Soldier freezes. She is not the mission and it is not under orders to initiate civilian casualties this time. Steven Rogers. Natalia Alianovna Romanova. That is the mission. The Soldier is required to defend itself; it is a valuable asset. But the female is not combat trained. She is not armed. She is not a threat. She-

The female takes the card from its hand. The Soldier allows her to push past, although the servos in the metal arm whir and buzz. The Soldier forces the limb still. She is not the mission. 

“Let’s see now...Did you prepay?” 

The Asset doesn’t know what that means so it shakes its head. 

The female says, “Ah, well, you can’t get a ticket here, then. This is collection only. Gotta go to the window over there. I guess this is all tricky if you’re not, you know, from here. What’s that accent, anyway? Polish?”

The Soldier makes an uncertain humming noise. The female seems to take this as an affirmation.

“Right,” she says, “Come on.” The female continues to talk as she beckons the Soldier to follow her. “So where you headed? New York? Baltimore? Washington?”

“Washington,” says the Asset, and adds; “End of the line.”

“One way? You should get the Greyhound, slower but cheaper...No? Suit yourself, buddy.” 

The female leads the Asset to a line of people. They wait a short while and then the female goes up to a small window and talks to someone on the other side. She hands over the credit card and then receives it back with a piece of card. Then she takes a card out of her own pocket and goes through the process again. The Soldier waits in silence to one side until the female leaves the window. She comes over and holds out the ticket and the credit card. 

“Here,” she says, and the Asset takes the items. She smiles at it. “Well, I gotta head out, my train’s about to leave. Good luck, James.”

The civilian trots off into the crowd and has gone before the Asset recovers from the sound of that word. That  _ name _ , the one that it is not allowed to even think of. It echoes inside the hollows that fill the Soldier like the voids in bone marrow. 

It is only later it sees the name on the stolen credit card reads  _ Dr. James Novak. _ The Asset is not aware of the concept of coincidence.

The Asset boards the train, keeps the body small and still, keeps the head down. One or two civilians glance at it, but no-one pays it any attention. The clothes make it invisible. It grips the gun tightly inside its pocket with its metal hand and folds itself into a seat. The flesh limbs are shaking again and the shuddering, clattering jerk of the train makes it feel nauseous and dizzy.  _ Afraid. _ The lights from the window wash over it in silence. 

The Soldier gets off the train in Washington. It knows that returning here will be dangerous. There will be enemies everywhere, watching the streets, the cameras. Workmen, such as its clothing suggests, are seldom paid much attention but there are others who can become utterly invisible in populated places. The Soldier finds the right kind of dingy alley, finds a bundle of discarded clothes wedged under a pile of cardboard boxes. It disposes of the workman’s overalls, the vest and the stolen wallet, and puts on the clothes it finds over its combat gear. Layers of ragged cloth, stiff and stinking. A long shapeless coat to go over it all. And there’s a hat, at last, scratchy grey wool that shadows its face. The Soldier leaves the alley and sets off on foot towards the base. Slow, shuffling. Head down. Now, no-one looks at it at all. Civilians, law enforcement, soldiers - they all pass by without a glance. Now, it is completely invisible. 

It looks up to the sky, expecting smoke but there is none. Yes, of course. That was days ago. The fires will have burned out. Instead it sees its target’s face, fluttering in the wind. There are words beneath: _CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE LIVING LEGEND AND SYMBOL OF COURAGE_. There is the word _Smithsonian._ Red, white and blue, a kaleidoscope of stars. The mission is pervasive. His name and his symbols have infected this land. The Asset sees them everywhere.

The Asset arrives at the Base 52C7 but the Ideal Federal Savings Bank building stands in the middle of a busy intersection. Trying to enter during daylight hours will attract attention. Bases must be protected at all costs. The Asset finds a doorway opposite the bank. It is not difficult to scare off the ragged civilian occupying the space and the Asset doesn’t even need to draw a weapon; one look at the Asset’s eyes and the man flees. The Asset takes his place, squatting down amongst sheets of cardboard and stained blankets. It waits. 

Its eyes close briefly and the next thing the Soldier can be sure of is that it is night time. The roads are quiet. It is time to move out. The Asset crosses the road, moves down an alley that runs beside the base. There is a door; solid grey metal. Electronic keypad. The Soldier punches the lock mechanism until there is only a sparking hole in the wall and the door clicks open. It enters the base. There is lightness and darkness. Flickering shadows, full of ghosts and torn wisps of memory. Paper swirls through the still air. There’s a room that makes its thoughts go numb. There should be a Chair, but this place is empty. It too has been emptied and then abandoned. Discarded. There should be a Chair. There should-

A hand on the flesh arm. The Soldier lurches back, ready to strike. A voice says:

“MPD! Stop right there! Don’t move, pal.”

_ Pal. _ The Asset stops, frozen in place. Bright beams of light are burning into its eyes, and it holds up an arm, blinking, turning away. 

“What are you doing in here?” says one of the men. There are two of them. They wear police uniforms. That is bad; the Asset must not be seen. Law enforcement will interfere with its missions. It must not be seen or captured by law enforcement. The Soldier sees a gun then and the metal arm is starting to move on its own. No.  _ No. _ Not the mission. These men are not the mission. But it must not be seen. 

It could kill them both, in under two seconds. It should. There are no witnesses and it must stay hidden. A ghost. But, suddenly, it finds it doesn’t want to kill them. Even when it is not sure what ‘want’ means. It is afraid.

“Hey! Didn’t you hear me? I said, what are you doing here?” The tone is aggressive, dangerous. The gun is still drawn. 

“Doug, leave off,” says the second male, His voice is tired. “He’s just a junkie.”

The Soldier has yet to answer the question. It is still shielding its eyes from the flashlights, night vision burned away, tense and trembling and torn apart between opposing forces.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone," it hears its own mouth say. "I’m looking for...It’s empty.”

“Jesus,” mutters the second cop.

“Empty or not, this is private property,” says the first male, the one with the callsign  _ Doug _ , and then the man sighs and puts his gun away. “You have to go somewhere else to shoot up. Understand? Come on, get out.”

The cop makes a sharp gesture towards the door, but he doesn’t touch the Asset. The Asset stumbles anyway but makes it to the corridor. Up the stairs, and then out into the alley. The cops follow it out. The Asset keeps its chin low, doesn’t look in their eyes.

“Now get lost. Don’t come back here, alright?” says the cop called Doug.

“Yes, sir,” says the Asset, and goes to turn away.

“Wait a second,” says the other cop. He holds his torch up, shining the light bright in the Asset’s eyes, looking at it's face. The Asset stands still, tense. The cop says; “You a vet? A soldier?”

“Yes, sir,” says the Soldier.

The cop nods. “Yeah, thought so. My brother, he served. Iraq.”

The Asset doesn’t respond. The male leans forward holding its hand out. He is holding a bank note with the number 20 on it.

“Here,” he says. “Look like you could use a bit of help.” 

The Asset takes the money in silence. It can’t recall the word it ought to say.

“You need a medic for that hand?” The cop says. The Asset glances down and sees the bank note clutched in its left hand. The metal is still hidden beneath the bandages.

The Soldier shakes his head. 

“Get yourself something to eat.” The man says. “And there’s a shelter two blocks over. Tell them Alan sent you. There’s people who want to help. It might feel like it sometimes, but remember you’re not alone, okay?”

“Now scram,” says the cop called Doug, “and don’t let us see you back here again, understand?”

The Soldier nods again. As it walks away it hears the man say: “You are such a sucker, you know that, right?”

The Soldier leaves. It walks. Its systems are continuing to fail. And this time its brain does not seem to be functioning either. The safe house was empty. The base was empty. Its Handlers have gone. It has been abandoned. Its work has been a gift to mankind, and yet it has been left behind.

An order. Someone had given it an order.  _ Get yourself something to eat. _ The twenty crinkles in its metal fingers. The Asset finds a late night store – it takes cans off the shelves, bottles of water. Walks away. The money is gone. It thinks it paid for them. 

It walks. Finds a ladder and climbs. Up on the roofs, amidst hissing ventilation pipes, fire escapes and the gleam of scattered light from frosted skylights the Soldier finally feels some comfort. It finds another abandoned building and hunkers down into a corner, walls at its back and side, the edge ahead and the cold of night settling into borrowed bones. But the fleeting glimpse of security the vantage offers is not enough to hold back the tide that is cresting over it. Its programming has failed. Its mission has failed. Now it's breathing fails too, chest constricted; its eyes malfunction and its fists are flying out, striking at nothing. Pain sparks up the metal arm like wildfire and across its back and into its lungs and a shutdown follows, hard and uncontrolled. 

When it reboots, the Asset’s face has had time to dry. 

It has failed its mission.  _ The man on the bridge. I'm not gonna fight you.  _ The echo of a voice says  _ Good luck, James _ . The very name makes the Asset nauseous, clammy cold sweat. Skin tingling in expectation of the stun batons.  _ You know me _ , says another voice. _ Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. _ The Asset knows what James Barnes was. An American soldier, a criminal. The Asset knows what Barnes is now. Little shreds of ephemeral memory that get tangled up sometimes in its programming, like weeds in a net. James Barnes is dead. He is nothing more than a will-o’-the-wisp. A ghost.

The food cans are still lying by its foot. Eating the food was an implied sub-directive within the cop’s order, so the Asset cuts the top of the cans off with its knife. The smell of the first can makes it retch before the food is even on its tongue. The Asset eats and waits. It is not long before its stomach is cramping, hard and painful, twisting like a knife blade under its ribs. The food comes spewing up, splattering the floor by its boots. It opens the second can, eats that. It shuts down for an hour this time before the body rejects the food once more. When daylight comes the third can goes the same way. 

The water, at least, stays inside. 

The Asset can barely feel the skin it wears so loosely now, wrapped over its bones like a body bag. Cold has seeped into the limbs, numbing its fingers, stiffening joints. Pain throbs with every breath, drawn in deep inside like it has swallowed knives. It has been abandoned. 

It followed its orders until they ran out. Without orders, without Handlers, without weapons...It's programming turns through erratic, uncertain spirals. It has no Handlers. They did not come back. The Soldier failed its mission (it has never failed a mission). The Handlers take it away when its mission is completed. Take it away, tuck it safely back into the ice. Remove any requirement for thought. Neutralise the need for anything but safe, simple compliance.

Ready to comply.

It has never failed a mission.  _ The man on the bridge. I want confirmed death in 10 hours _ . When Captain America is dead, the mission will be complete. When the mission is complete, the Handlers will return. They will fix the arm and take the hunger away. The Soldier can go back to the ice, where it can sleep. Where it belongs.

It will follow its programming. The Soldier has orders. It will see this mission through. 

For that, it needs intel. Captain America, the Asset thinks. The living legend and symbol of courage. 

The Smithsonian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and let me know if you enjoyed it! Part 2 coming soon.  
> Stay safe, everyone.


	2. Steve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to fab betas [Percygranger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Percygranger/pseuds/Percygranger) and [Lightsider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightsider/pseuds/Lightsider), who really helped me knock this chapter into shape.  
> And thanks to everyone that read and left kudos!

They leave the cemetery. Sam drives, and behind them, Nat and Nick Fury fade into shadows in the rear view mirror. Steve had spectacularly failed to answer Sam’s _Where do we start?_ but the man keeps his peace as they leave the city behind. It’s obvious he was expecting some well-constructed strategy for finding Bucky, but Steve has nothing. Honestly, it’s all he can do at this point just to keep walking and talking. Steve makes some vague comment about them heading for New York, because he's pretty sure they’ll end up at Stark Tower eventually. He’ll need JARVIS’s help to sift through all the HYDRA data Nat leaked to find any leads but it is going to take a while. They should start as soon as possible. Also, Tony’s been calling non-stop, though Steve has mostly been letting it go to voicemail. He just...can’t talk to Tony right now. Doesn’t really want to talk to anyone. 

Thank God for Sam Wilson though, because as soon as Steve can’t answer, Sam understands. His buddy Mitch has a place in upstate Minnesota in the hills, he says, couple of days' drive. He’ll borrow a car from someone named Tessa, they’ll go up there, take a few days. Steve’s still recovering after all. It's not hiding so much as just...not being around.

It’s pretty quiet as they drive and they go slow, take the scenic route. Steve dozes a lot; after all, it’s only been six days since he was shot three times and almost drowned, and he’s still far from healthy. They talk, sometimes. Sam asks about Bucky, of course, which was inevitable. Steve hadn’t been able to help himself; he had been drawn back to the Smithsonian the moment he got out of the hospital, like he was on a leash. Normally, Steve would have clammed up or changed the subject, but this was Sam. Sam, who had stood next to him in the museum and watched a 15 second loop of a dead man laughing for three hours, and never said a word. Steve finds, suddenly, that he _can_ talk about Bucky, maybe for the first time. Nothing recent, nothing about the horrors they both know Bucky must have endured; that’s still too bloody a wound (the Kiev file is sitting unread on Steve’s lap. He hasn’t yet had the courage to open it). But he can talk about Brooklyn, about growing up. And then, finally, about the war. 

He tells Sam all about Austria. He’d mentioned it before, of course, when they were wondering just how Bucky could still be alive, after all this time. He’d mentioned the experiments. But now he tells Sam everything. The USO tour, the dancing monkey. Peggy and Howard and Chester Phillips. The slaughter at Azzano, the factory in Kreischberg and the cages. The laboratory. Bucky. About how scared he had been.

“Busting in there,” Steve says. “...God, I had no idea what I was doing. I was lucky I didn’t get shot in the head.”

Sam agrees. “You had no training? At all?” 

“I went through basic,” Steve admits. “But I was half the size back then, before the serum, and after that everything was new. And either way, nothing could have prepared me for that, for seeing what I saw there...It hadn't even been six months since I'd last seen Bucky. He barely knew me.”

He doesn’t say anything else again for a long time.

On the first night they pass three different motels before they turn off their course in a random direction and stop at the fourth. It doesn’t seem like overkill, not after the week they’ve had, but perhaps Nat’s paranoia is catching. Sam showers first, then Steve, then they order pizza and pay by cash. Sam has to give Steve the hard stare until he can force some down. After they eat, Steve turns his phone on. There’s now five missed calls from Stark, a new record. Looks like someone’s finally noticed he’s absconded from the hospital. Steve texts him with “I’m okay. I’ll call later,” and then turns the phone off again. 

They plan to sleep in shifts, but both of them lie awake most of the night regardless. Neither can shake the feeling that they are still in danger, still hunted men. Nothing happens, and the next day passes much like the first, with a blur of endless fields, small towns, identical intersections. Sam drives slow and they stick to the back roads. They spend the night in the third motel they see, twenty miles from the highway. Sam drinks a single beer that night and talks about Riley. Steve listens. 

They sleep, but badly.

It’s the third and last night of their journey when they finally hear from Nat. They drive past two perfectly nice motels after deciding to stop, and so, of course, the third resembles a septic tank. They’re both too tired to find somewhere else or go back, so they check in, requesting the last room in the row, as usual. Steve is content to do little more than watch TV and pass out. Nat texts them while they’re eating some sort of microwaved frozen dinner. The food is some awful combination of bland, sweet and greasy, and Steve’s fairly confident he’s eaten more palatable K-rations. Nat tells them her interview at Capitol Hill did not go without incident but she’s not concerned. Steve just hopes she knows what she’s doing.

Steve unintentionally falls asleep, quite suddenly, after eating and he pays the price for it when he wakes about 0130 to find he hasn’t moved in an hour and the closing bullet wound in his gut is aching like a son of a bitch. By the steady orange glow of the sodium streetlight outside he can see that Sam is fast asleep on the other bed. Their plan of sleeping in shifts has already gone out the window, but Steve is too tired to remember which of them was supposed to be on watch right now anyway. 

He heads into the bathroom. He’s moving quietly, trying not to wake Sam, but there’s water spilled on the tile by the sink and for a moment Steve loses his usually flawless balance. The slip saves his life though, because it means his head is two inches to the left when the bullet flies past his ear. 

A figure launches itself from the dark and instantly there’s a gun at Steve’s head; Steve knocks it from the attacker’s hand, strikes out, hitting only air. Something impacts against his back over the right kidney, and then a punch like a tire iron connects with his face and his jaw goes _crack_. Agony floods him and he falls to the floor with the attacker on him. A knife blade flashes, and he can’t open his mouth to call for help even if the thought had occurred to him. He throws his arm out, grabbing a wrist, but the assailant’s other fist follows up with a grinding punch into his stomach, straight into the site of a healing bullet wound. Steve groans through his teeth and his grip loosens. 

The Winter Soldier twists, snatches up the gun from the floor with his free hand and swings it around to aim at Steve. A gunshot cracks through the air, deafening in the small room, but it is the Soldier that jolts and goes over sideways. Steve gasps out “ _Sam!”_ through his teeth - a futile warning - as Sam runs in, lowering his Glock, and stomping down on the Winter Soldier’s hand, kicking the SIG-Sauer away. Steve rolls after the Soldier, trying to grapple him. 

In his peripheral vision Steve sees Sam pull out a second gun and he fires again, straight at the Soldier. At the last second the Soldier kicks out hard and throws himself back, breaking Steve’s grip, and a red tipped dart embeds itself harmlessly in the black body armour rather than flesh. Sam curses, yanking at the tranq gun in a way that suggests the next round is jammed, but the moment’s pause is long enough. The Soldier twists the metal arm up out of Steve’s grip and Steve tries to deflect it but the blade in the Soldier’s fist slips free and punches straight into Steve’s bicep, just as the Winter Soldier’s head flies back and smashes into Steve’s nose. Steve’s grip falters, and the Soldier is free; he rolls over, bringing the blade up to Steve’s throat. 

Sam fires a third time. 

This time, the dart catches the Soldier in the thigh, punching through the thick fabric like paper. The Soldier clearly recognises the threat and instantly rips the dart out, but it’s too late and whatever is in there is working fast. The Winter Soldier stoops, snatches up the SIG-Sauer but he’s already shaking and there’s no time to raise the gun before he slumps to one knee, fingers loose. The gun skitters from his hand across the floor and Sam runs over, knocking the Soldier’s knife out of his other fist and kicking the weapons away into a corner. The Soldier makes one last wild, uncoordinated swing, and then collapses face first onto the tile.

For a moment, nobody moves. Sam keeps the gun trained on the Winter Soldier, before using one foot to shove him over onto his back. He seems unconscious. Steve wants to go to him, but for the moment he can’t do anything but curl forward, trying to breathe through his busted nose, cradling his jaw. Sam backs over to him.

“You okay?” Sam demands, breathless. Steve manages a nod. Sam pushes the Glock into Steve’s hands. “Alright. Just watch him; I’ll be right back.”

Sam disappears back into the bedroom. 

Steve drops the Glock and stumbles across to the Winter Soldier. He’s completely out of it; head slumped to the side and limbs splayed around. Steve kneels in the blood pooling onto the tile and pushes Bucky’s head back, forcing his mouth open. The bare bulb in the ceiling is too dingy to see by, so Steve shoves two fingers in instead, running them around the unconscious man’s teeth. 

Sam comes back in at a run, and Steve hears his startled intake of breath.

“What the hell…?”

“Cyanide,” Steve grinds out through his own gritted teeth, trying not to move his jaw. “In false teeth.” He’d seen too many HYDRA agents choking and spitting their way to an agonising death on bloody foam. Getting the tooth out before the captured enemy could rob them of their prize had always been the first priority. Old ingrained training he thought he’d long forgotten. Incapacitate, disarm. Find the tooth and rip it out.

“Fuck me,” Sam breathes as Steve slumps back in relief, letting go of the Soldier's head and bringing his hands up to cradle his own jaw again. 

“Nothing,” he tells Sam. “There’s nothing.” The Soldier’s teeth seem to be all his own, mouth clear of capsules or hollow implants or bloody foam. Maybe HYDRA didn’t do that anymore. 

Sam crouches down beside the Soldier, and Steve finally sees what he went back to the room for; a set of bands of thick dull metal, the same handcuffs Rumlow’s STRIKE team had tried to get on Steve’s wrists in the elevator at the Triskelion. Sam drags the Soldier’s arms behind him and cuffs them, firmly. He crouches beside the downed Soldier, monitoring his breathing for a long two minutes before he seems to be satisfied that whatever the hell was in that tranq dart hasn't put Bucky so deeply under that he's at risk of forgetting how to breathe. Then Sam is at Steve’s side again, reaching for him urgently.

“Steve. Steve, sit still, let me see. I think he broke your jaw.”

Sam pushes Steve into a chair, and despite Steve’s urgent gestures towards the Winter Soldier still lying bleeding on the bathroom floor, Sam insists on seeing to Steve’s injuries first; setting his nose, bandaging the stab wound in his arm and then checking that the older GSWs in his torso haven’t reopened. Sam also confirms that the Soldier’s blow has probably fractured Steve’s mandible on the right hand side. They can’t do much about it other than dose him with painkillers that he’ll burn through in hours. Sam doesn’t even suggest going back to the hospital, for which Steve is grateful; the fracture doesn’t feel displaced, and Steve usually heals from broken bones within a day or two. This one should be no different so long as he doesn’t talk too much. “Shame,” Steve hears Sam mutter, and decides just to roll his eyes in comment.

They finally turn their attention to the Winter Soldier. Sam checks his injuries with a brisk efficiency that is becoming comfortably familiar. The blood is from where Sam had winged the Soldier with that first bullet; the shot scored a deep gouge through the muscle in his right thigh. It’s bleeding pretty badly but not badly enough to indicate an artery has been nicked. Still, it would be a serious injury for a normal man, but for a supersoldier it should mend well enough. Steve helps where he can but largely he’s just in the way, so he sits back while Sam stitches and bandages and just stares at the man who used to be Bucky Barnes. There hasn’t been a waking minute in the past eight days when that moment hasn’t been replaying over and over in Steve’s head, the moment the mask clattered away across the asphalt and the Winter Soldier - ghost, terrorist, monster - had turned his face towards him. The shock and horror had hit him like a lightning strike. When he had suddenly realised just who the fabled Winter Soldier really was, that Bucky was alive and standing right there, not beside him but across from him, on the side of the enemy. For HYDRA. The thought of Bucky so deadly, so coldly detached, so utterly merciless...it had paralysed Steve, even as Rumlow’s men were cuffing him, aiming their guns at Sam, even as Nat was bleeding out in the prison van. 

But even knowing that this _is_ Bucky, the man lying on the floor is barely recognisable even beyond the list of changes that Steve’s brain has already catalogued, like the hair, the hollowed shadow of his eyes and the awful brutal horror of damage implied by the prosthetic arm. Right now though, he looks far worse than before. Now the Soldier is also filthy, bearded and half-starved. As they search him and treat his injuries, it’s also clear that beneath the grimy tac gear the solid bulk of his body is already whittling away to something that for Steve is a more familiar whipcord thinness. He looks like a feral animal. 

Back in DC, the Winter Soldier had been backed up by a dozen HYDRA agents, armed to the teeth and at the top of their game. Sam had described the way the HYDRA men on the overpass had let the Soldier take lead, had handed him any weapon he needed, had whisked him away the moment the fight was done. But now he’s alone. He has only the one handgun and a knife, and it looks and smells like he’s wearing the same clothes as a week ago. This whole attack has an air of desperation to it, even if it was far too close to succeeding for comfort. God only knows how he got in here without either of them hearing it. And what does it all mean? If Bucky somehow escaped from HYDRA after DC, why is he still trying to kill them? If he’s not alone why is he in such bad shape? Are more HYDRA agents waiting outside right now, ready to kick the door in? Steve has a million questions but the only person he has a chance of getting any answers out of is Sam, because _where the hell did Sam get a supersoldier tranquiliser gun from?_

Steve's patience lasts just as long as it takes for Sam to be finished with the medical care. Steve drags Sam back into the main room, grabs one the spent tranq darts and holds it out pointedly. He wants an explanation, right _now_. 

Unfortunately he has to wait a little longer, because, as Sam points out they're under a ticking clock. 

“I'll explain it, Steve, I swear, but when we're in the car and well away from here. There’s probably more HYDRA guys on the way. And if there aren’t, someone has to have heard those gunshots and even in a shithole like this they'll probably have called the cops. As much as I'd love some heavily armed backup right now, I really don't know how to even start explaining the unconscious bleeding man we have tied up in our bathroom.”

It's a good point, and they definitely do not want to be dealing with civilian law enforcement right now. Quickly and quietly as they can, the pair of them drag the unconscious Winter Soldier out of the motel and stuff him in the back of the car. He’s a dead weight, at least as heavy as Steve, and the arm alone feels like it weighs about a ton. Steve’s face can certainly attest to that.

There’s not much else to bring out of the room; Sam is only travelling with a bug-out bag he grabbed from his place before they set off, and Steve’s apartment was still a crime scene when they left DC. Still, they grab what they have, do a swift but efficient clean down of the room and scramble into the car. Sam pushes the tranq gun into Steve’s hands just before they pull out of the lot. There’s a fresh dart in the magazine.

“What the hell is this?” Steve mumbles as soon as the lights of the motel have disappeared out of the rear window. He keeps his body turned in the seat, eyes fixed on the black, unmoving mass on the Winter Soldier in the back. He's got the tranq gun aimed at Bucky and the other hand is clutching a bag of melting ice to his aching face. It's not doing nearly enough to quell the stabbing pain.

“Man, stop talking.”

“Tranq gun…” Steve persists. “Where’d you get it?”

“Seriously, Steve. Shut up. I'm not re-aligning a fractured mandible at a pitch black roadside because you couldn't keep from yapping your trap. It was Nat, if you hadn't figured that out. The darts, tranq gun, cuffs…She left it all with me when she came to visit you at the hospital, before you even asked her to get you the Winter Soldier’s file. Apparently she knows you better than you do 'cause she clearly knew you would take off after him first chance you got.”

“Where?” Steve says, through clenched teeth, not content with Sam's answer. 

Sam navigates them out onto the freeway. “Where did she get it? I don't know, man. Maybe it was old SHIELD tech. All she told me was that the knock-out juice is the same stuff Dr Banner came up with to use as anaesthetic on you during surgery, but until a few minutes ago I had no idea if it would work on _him_ too but there wasn’t much choice. Better than me shooting him somewhere more permanent.” 

“You should’ve just told me.” Steve tries not to feel the little burn of emotion at the deception, tries to recognise Sam’s actions as a tactical move and not another betrayal. He’s been getting used to secrets and lies and agendas from Fury, Nat, Clint...even Tony. But Sam... Sam had seemed like the first honest person he'd met in this century, except perhaps Thor. Sam was certainly the first person who wasn't playing from a different rulebook to Steve, who didn't always have some other agenda of their own. The first person who wanted absolutely nothing from him.

Sam sighs. “I didn’t tell you about the dart gun before because...well, if I’m honest, I never thought we’d find any trace of the Winter Soldier, maybe not for months. I read the file, I know what he’s been trained to do. If he wasn't dead or back with HYDRA, I figured he'd go underground, disappear off to Africa or Eastern Europe or somewhere. I certainly never thought he’d turn round and come straight for you, after everything. I only had the gun case with all the stuff in with us in the motel ‘cause I didn’t want to risk it getting jacked from the car overnight.”

Steve is silent. Sam lied to him by omission but he's also just saved both their lives and provided a way to neutralise the Winter Soldier that hopefully hasn't done any long term damage, resulted in zero civilian casualties and meant Steve didn't have to get the crap kicked out of him again. And if he really thought this search would take months, then that means Sam willingly signed himself up for the long haul, and that he’s going to see this thing through. But even knowing that, knowing that Sam isn't going anywhere, it still kind of feels like the rug has been pulled out from under Steve's feet again, when he'd barely got his balance back the first time. HYDRA are back. Nat is in hiding and Fury is in the wind. SHIELD has gone, forever, and Bucky is _alive_. Alive and broken and all but unrecognisable. 

“And not to change the subject,” Sam continues, probably aware of Steve’s spiralling thoughts. “But what are we supposed to do now? Cruising around with a wanted terrorist on the backseat might be an everyday event for you but I’m still getting used to this whole spy agency/superhero thing.”

Steve shrugs and shakes his head. He honestly has no idea. At the moment, Sam is just driving north, the sole aim of which is to get as far from the motel as possible. But the Winter Soldier isn’t going to stay unconscious. At the moment he's slumped on his side on the backseat, still and limp, wild hair covering a slack, pale face. Seeing him relaxed like this, totally out of it, he looks so like the Bucky Steve remembers from those first months after Kreischberg that it’s painful. 

“How long?” Steve asks, gesturing back towards the Soldier with the dart gun.

Sam understands the question. “Nat said they guessed the dosage might keep someone of your size and metabolism under for about three hours. But with him? All I know is we gotta get him somewhere secure fast before it wears off. ”

“The cabin,” Steve says through his teeth. They should carry on to the cabin. It’s the only real option. It’s remote, isolated and currently unoccupied. Until they can figure out how dangerous the Winter Soldier is Steve doesn’t want him near other people. 

Sam is frowning. “Mitch’s place is still about five hours away…I’m pretty sure this guy is gonna come round before that and he’s probably gonna be pissed. I mean, I know he’s cuffed but it’s not like that ever stopped _you_. It’s making my neck itch just to have him lying there asleep behind me while I’m driving, let alone awake. Not keen to go through the whole destroy-the-car, freeway-death-slide thing again. Isn’t there someone we can radio, you know, for containment? Or back-up?”

Steve just sighs a little and rubs his aching jaw. Does he have back-up? There’s the Avengers, of course. Tony has been trying to call for a week - Steve could probably ask for his help. Or Maria Hill, if there is anything left of SHIELD that’s still operational, and if Steve can find it in him to trust any of them ever again. Would Nat come back if he needed her? Maybe. But the thing is...he doesn’t think he even _wants_ their help. Bucky...the Winter Soldier...whatever the man on the backseat is. It all just seems so unreal, so fantastical that he should be here, alive, breathing. The essence of Steve’s world has been deconstructed and rebuilt so many times now - the serum, the war, the ice, the Avengers, HYDRA - and this time the fabric of his reality has pulled apart and let Bucky back in. Steve needs to figure out what is left of the man he knew, on his own. The others, particularly Tony; they would want to take command, to take control. To possess. He knows they would only see the Winter Soldier. They would only see an enemy.

“The cabin,” Steve just says again.

Sam nods, slowly. “All right, it’s your call. Just keep your eyes on him. There’s only one dart left, but even then I think we shouldn't use it on him again if we can help it. It was pretty risky tranquilising him in the first place given the cocktail of shit that file says they were pumping into him. I really don't wanna risk sedating him again. But if he wakes up fighting and we have to use the other tranq dart, we’re gonna need help. A lot of help.” 

Steve nods. What else can they do?

Despite Sam’s estimate of three hours, they only manage to drive for just over one before the Winter Soldier starts shifting on the back seat. Sam’s eyes snap straight to the rear view mirror.

“Shit. Is he waking up already?”

Steve has the dart gun raised and ready, but the Soldier doesn’t even seem to open his eyes. Instead he rolls slightly on his side and then starts retching. 

“I’m pulling over.”

Sam stops at the edge of the road and they both make their way cautiously to the back of the car. Steve keeps the tranq gun up and trained on their prisoner, while Sam carefully opens the rear door nearest the Soldier’s head end so he can’t get kicked. The Soldier is lying hunched on his side and doesn’t look up.

“Hey,” says Sam. 

There’s no answer. Sam takes a cautious step closer. 

“Hey,” he tries again, louder. “Can you hear me?”

Again there’s no response except for a painful-looking convulsion and more retching. It’s the oldest trick in the book - pretending to be ill - but this time Steve just can’t see the Soldier being capable of deception when he hardly even seems to really be conscious. His eyes are half closed and the gaze behind the lids is unfocused. He still hasn’t said a word. 

After some deliberation, they carefully drag the Soldier up and spin him around so he’s leaning out the car door. He doesn't struggle. Thin strings of bile, vomit and spit are smeared across his face and his pants, and unless puking on command was a skill HYDRA taught all their operatives, that part at least wasn’t faked. They wash what they can off the Soldier’s face and hair but honestly there’s not much to clean up; it’s mostly just bile. Through it all the Soldier doesn’t look at them or speak a word, but neither does he show any signs of attacking. He’s like a limp ragdoll. A puppet with its strings cut.

Steve can’t help but worry at the state of him. It’s clear from his meagre stomach contents that Bucky hasn’t eaten or drunk much of anything for hours. Maybe longer. Whatever he’s been doing for the past week, neither food nor water featured prominantly. Sam is concerned about dehydration so they find a bottle of water in the trunk, and carefully pour the contents into him in little sips. The Soldier is at least aware enough not to choke and for now he manages to keep the fluids down. 

They decide to carry on. The Soldier doesn’t seem to be violent any more at least. Sam thinks he’s biding his time. Sam and Steve take it in turns between who drives and who keeps the Soldier at gun point. His eyes remain open after the last bout of throwing up but he doesn’t seem to be any more aware of his surroundings. He just sits and silently stares forward at the passenger seat from behind his curtain of hair and he doesn’t answer when Steve tries to speak to him. If he has been trying to get free of the cuffs, neither of them have seen it. 

It’s a long, tense drive that takes the rest of the night but they finally arrive at the cabin around eight in the morning, just as it is getting light. The house itself is up a long track, covered over by low maple trees dropping the last of their red leaves across the drive. When they reach the summit of the low hill they can see the place is more of a house than a log cabin – it’s only one story but there’s probably seven or eight rooms extending back into the trees.

Steve stays to watch the Winter Soldier while Sam goes up to unlock the house. He still hasn't moved or spoken; his unfocused gaze lingering somewhere being his knees in the footwell. When they try and move the Soldier inside, however, it’s clear that the blank staring is no act - whether it's still the tranquillisers or some other injury, it’s clear the Winter Soldier is barely conscious and his legs don’t seem to want to function at all. Once more they end up essentially dragging him up to the house and into the front room. They dump their prisoner into a solid wood chair and cuff his arms behind the seat back. 

The Soldier closes his eyes and sits in silence.


	3. Asset

The Asset reboots, retching.

It takes a moment to determine that it is seated in The Chair. That brings an odd sensation bubbling up its chest that the Asset cannot compute. The Chair is what it needs, the Asset knows this. But it’s always the mission report first, then maintenance, then the chair. Then, after everything is done, the blissful, agonising cool nothing of the ice. But never the Chair first...they haven’t debriefed it yet. The Asset has never failed a mission, that’s what they tell it. Captain America is still alive, so the mission is not over. They shouldn’t wipe it before the mission is complete. 

But it has been a long time since the last wipe. Too long. The Asset is unstable. Erratic. It needs this. The Asset would beg for the wipe now, if it was allowed to beg. If it was allowed words. It would plead for them to scour the Soldier clean, from the inside out. To scrub away the endless whispers of _James Barnes_ echoing around inside its head. To be cleansed, unpolluted of that unquiet spirit, no matter how painful. 

There is something else though. Its situational awareness isn’t usually so slow to come online but...the restraints are wrong. Its arms are in the wrong place. The band over its chest is too tight; it is crushing the air out of its lungs. The Asset’s hands clench up; it feels a tremor passing up the arm and into Barnes’ body. The skin burns and crawls over its bones. The Soldier’s breath stutters, and the air is like fire. There’s a voice somewhere. Secretary Pierce? Field Handler Rumlow? The voice says, _Bucky, please._ And it says _Breathe. You’re safe._ The Asset doesn’t know what that means. Someone touches its shoulders, its face. It takes 4.5 minutes for the oxygen saturation in Barnes’ body to fall below minimum operational levels. The Soldier shuts down.

Next time it reboots, the Soldier recognises that it is seated in just _a chair_ , and not in _The Chair_. For one thing, the Asset’s hands are bound tight behind the chair back and not on the usual arm rests at its sides. There is no halo of wires over Barnes’ head. The med techs and laboratory staff are not there. Secretary Pierce is not there. The Mission is not there. There is a black man in a dark jacket sitting on a red couch across the room, well out of arm’s reach. He is not holding a weapon that the Asset can see, but there is a telltale crease to the jacket.. Shoulder holster on the right. Maybe left too. 

The Asset keeps its head lowered while its eyes quickly scan the room. There are two doors, both internal; one shut, one open. Sight of a hallway beyond. Plain, wood-beam ceiling. A window, shuttered closed. Fireplace, not lit. Weapons: a lamp with around two metres of cable, some sticks of furniture, a table. Glass fronted picture frames on the walls. Their bootlaces. His arm.

The Mission is nearby. The Asset can hear him breathing. He’s through the open door, perhaps, out of sight, but watchful. Listening. 

All this adds up to one conclusion. The Asset has been captured. The Asset has failed its mission. Acid burns into its stomach at the realisation, skin crawls and heart stutters, uncomfortably. Pain in the shoulder, back, leg - a minor bullet wound. The body requires repair.

“Hey,” says the black man. His voice is quiet, artificially mild. Controlled. “You’re awake.”

The Asset waits, staring at the floor. There have been no instructions issued. It cannot comply.

“We haven’t been properly introduced,” the man continues. “Although you might remember the time you shredded my wing and kicked me off a roof. Ring any bells?”

There is a touch of dry sharpness to the man’s tone. The Asset observes that, files it away. But it does not remember the incident the man spoke of, so it does not issue a response.

“Anyway,” the man continues. “No hard feelings, I guess. I can let bygones be bygones, provided you stop trying to kill us. Think there's any chance of that?”

The man has still not given an order that the Asset understands, so it again does nothing. But the Soldier’s mind is whirring. It is waiting for orders on instinct, but if it has fought this man then he surely must be an enemy. He is not a Mission, but he is also not a Handler or STRIKE or a med tech. His status in the chain of command is uncertain at this time.

“Okay, well let's pretend you didn’t blank me and instead said a hearty ‘yes’ to that. So, moving on.” The man is continuing to talk. “Here we go, clean slate, like we’re meeting for the first time. My name is Sam, Sam Wilson. What is your name?”

The Asset feels _surprise_. The Soldier is always known. Its victims, if they are given the chance to see the Winter Soldier approaching; they know. They see the Asset and they know that they are looking at their death. And its masters know, of course, better than the Soldier does itself. They are the ones who tell the Soldier what it is when it has just crawled blank and empty from the ice. It is the Winter Soldier. The Cold Death. The Ghost. No one _asks._

There has been a long silence. Sam Wilson sits forward. “You know my name now, so it’s only fair,” he is saying. “You must have a name. Come on, tell me what people call you.”

An order. A strange order from an unknown agent, but, at this time, it will be easier to obey. It’s always easier to obey.

“Cолдат.”

Sam Wilson does not move but his eyes widen a little as if he is surprised that the Asset spoke, even though he ordered it to. Then his eyes narrow again, and he is speaking, even as he pulls out a cellphone and taps the screen a few times.

“Look, man, I don’t speak Russian but even I can figure that one out. I am not calling you ‘Soldat’. Might as well go the whole nine yards and call you 'Mister Fist-of-HYDRA'. Pick something else.”

“Aктив.”

Sam Wilson frowns down at the phone, which must be translating. "'Asset'? Jesus. Nope. Try again.”

“Призрак,” The Asset says, but Sam Wilson shakes his head. When the Asset glances up it sees his mouth is turned down but he doesn’t look angry.

“How do you feel about Barnes?” Sam Wilson asks, slowly. “Or James. I thought you might want to-”

The Asset throws itself forward, wrenching on its bound arms. It does not get free, but the chair tips a little and there is the sound of grinding metal in its shoulder. Sam Wilson jerks back.

“Hет.”  The Soldier spits out through the blinding pain shooting down its side. “No.”

Not that, never that. The correction required for such a breach of behaviour would be...extreme. The Asset does not say that name, even if it sometimes thinks of it. This is a test.

“Okay, take it easy,” Sam Wilson says, and his voice is calm and level again. “Okay. Not that. I’m not trying to upset you or force you to do anything you don't want. I'll just call you Winter Soldier for now, and you let me know if you think of another name you would prefer. You’ve been pretty sick over the last few hours, so you must be hungry and dehydrated. Want to try eating something?”

The Asset returns to its silence. It still isn’t sure what ‘want’ means.

Sam Wilson stands up and goes to the open door. “So, _Winter Soldier,”_ he is saying. He comes back carrying a plastic bowl and a spoon. “Can’t let you out of those cuffs, I’m afraid. Not while Ste- Not until we can be sure where your head is at. So I’ll feed you; might be humiliating but hey, you get to eat. I swear I won’t make airplane sounds.”

But the Asset doesn’t eat. It has never eaten. Sam Wilson cannot be a Handler if he doesn’t know that. Unless this is another test. A punishment. It failed its mission, after all. Captain Rogers is still alive and failure must always be punished.

Sam Wilson pulls up a chair and sits down right in front of the Soldier, holding the bowl out. If it had its hands free, the Asset could kill Sam Wilson eleven different ways without even using the spoon. As it is, its hands might be bound, but the Asset’s head isn’t restrained and its mask is gone. When this Sam Wilson leans forward, the Asset could rip his throat out using its teeth. Or it could smash its forehead into Sam Wilson’s face, and force shards of broken nose up into his brain. It could throw its weight backwards, smash the chair against the floor, drive a shard of the wood through Sam Wilson’s eye socket...

“They used to eat this kind of crap all the time back in your day, I’m told,” Sam Wilson is saying. “So it’s something that might be familiar at least. Open wide.”

The Asset’s programming obeys the order and the spoon is shoved in. The Asset’s mouth is filled up with a slurry of lukewarm mush, a coating of off-white slime with small, soft lumps pressed against its tongue. The Asset freezes, holding the stuff between its teeth, and looks down at the bowl. White, like pus, with small, bloated maggot bodies floating to the congealed surface. The Soldier suddenly remembers a girl it once saw in a humid rainforest, only a week dead but swelled up in the heat. A Handler had nudged the corpse with his boot, and the swollen skin had split and maggots and filth had poured out and spilled onto the ground. Now they’re sitting innocently in that bowl.

“I know plain porridge is possibly the most bland, boring foodstuff in the world,” Sam Wilson is saying. “But I have no idea how messed up the drugs and sedatives have left you, and you’ve gotta eat something man. It’s not going to do you any good to just sit there with your mouth full. Come on, swallow.”

The Asset complies, and the pus slides down Barnes's throat. Sam Wilson puts two more spoonfuls of maggots into its mouth before the Asset starts to cry. By the fifth spoonful, its stomach contorts and the maggots fill its mouth all over again. This punishment is stinking and noisy and horrible, and it doesn't want to think any more about dead girls or memories it’s not supposed to have. Doesn’t want to think about how it might have failed its mission, or that it is alone. The Asset finds a dark, quiet place in the back of James Barnes’ mind, and it folds itself up inside and everything goes away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For mobile users:  
> Cолдат - Soldier  
> Aктив - Asset  
> Призрак - Ghost  
> Нет - No


	4. Steve

It's 2013, and every truth Steve ever held is slowly falling away, piece by piece, like wet paper. America is free and the war is over (lies). SHIELD are the good guys (lies). HYDRA is gone (lies). Steve didn’t die for nothing (lies lies lies). Back in 1944 Steve knew many things. He could, for instance, have filled an anthology with things he knew about James Buchanan Barnes. But seventy years and Arnim Zola have eroded that knowledge too, until even the truth of his death was a lie. Steve has lost Bucky all over again, and, like Sam had pointed out barely a week ago, he had never really had a chance to grieve the first time.

So Steve begins learning Bucky Barnes anew, but of all the things he finds out during the next 24 hours, not one of them is good. Some things could have been predicted, such as a violent aversion to being touched. But some things are unsettling, unexpected discoveries. The Soldier cannot bear to hear the name James Barnes, for instance. He does not sleep. He does not eat. They try him on every mild and nutritious food they can find in Mitch’s pantry – white rice, stewed pork, beans, tinned fruit. Bucky cries silent tears while they force the food into him and then within minutes it gets hurled straight back up. He does at least drink water, if it’s held up to his mouth. He doesn’t speak much, and when he does it is a half mangled mix of Russian and English that they need the help of Sam’s phone to interpret. Mostly, he is silent. Sometimes he is catatonic.

They learn, much to Steve’s distress, that apart from when it comes to physical contact, Bucky doesn't seem to be aware of his own body at all. Sam calls it lack of recognition of ‘bodily autonomy’. He doesn’t seem to recognise being hungry or thirsty. He never answers when they ask him whether he’s in pain. And after the second time Bucky pisses himself they realise he is just not going to tell them when he needs to be let up to use the bathroom. Sam has to uncuff him from the chair and order him into the washroom every few hours just to make sure he is relieving himself. They are soon down to the last pair of sweatpants in the house.

They learn the Soldier will obey anything worded like an order, without question. They learn that he doesn't make eye contact. They learn that porridge is a horrible mistake. 

They make it to Friday morning before the next disaster. Bucky has been sitting quiet and still in the chair all night, looking pale and hurt and vulnerable, but he just won't sleep and they don't dare leave him alone. Sam has been watching him for hours now and he is starting to look almost as ragged as Bucky does, but they had already agreed that Steve at least needs to stay out of the Soldier's sight line. He's tried to kill Steve multiple times but hasn't attacked Sam yet except when it was self-defence or when he was in between the Soldier and his mission. From what they know of HYDRA it seems that Steve and Nat were the Soldier's last targets. If HYDRA even knew about Sam they probably didn't recognise him as a threat. But Steve… That's a different matter entirely and whatever they did to Bucky to break his free will, wipe his mind and compel him to kill without conscience…Sam and Steve have no idea how to undo it. 

But Steve has no doubt it can be undone, that HYDRA's control over Bucky has to be cracking. Steve knows he saw a glimpse of something else on the helicarrier. For the briefest moment, the brainwashing had slipped and something else had looked out through Bucky’s eyes; something frightened and in pain and something that  _ knew Steve _ . There’s no sign of it in the Soldier now, but who’s to say it can’t break free again? And there’s something else Steve knows, something that he hasn’t yet spoken out loud to anyone, not even Sam, and that was that he had known he wasn’t going to make it off the helicarrier alive. Not after the crystal was locked and he realised the man who had once been his best friend hadn’t made it off the ship either. He wasn't going to leave Bucky to fall alone again. 

And so they had fought, and he had dropped the shield and then he’d dropped after it. He remembers the fall, the impact of the icy surface, darkness. He should have died there; a cold, fitting, airless end beneath bitter water. But he didn’t die and they found him two hours later on the river bank, and no-one will admit that he was in no condition to have made it out of the water unaided. Only one person could have dragged him to shore. Bucky had saved him, and now it is killing Steve that he has to stay away, in another room or out of sight, while Bucky is the one that needs saving.

Whatever Natasha says, Steve has more than enough self-awareness to know how much he doesn't fit into this future. Since the moment he woke he has been out of place; a drifting, discordant note. So maybe it is selfish, this need to be near Bucky, to keep him in sight, to keep looking around the door to confirm that he’s really here too. He validates Steve’s own anachronism. He’s an anchor that Steve can tether himself too. He means that Steve is no longer alone in this wild, unpredictable future. But there really isn’t time to dwell on his introspection and self-doubt, and there’s a far more practical reason for Steve’s constant hovering, and that is that Sam can't do this by himself. The man is already exhausted. He’s already gone nearly 50 hours with only a couple of hours’ sleep, and he’s no supersoldier. And Bucky won't talk or eat or sleep and until he eventually collapses there's no sign anything is going to change.

Steve does what he can to help, which mostly means trying to find some food that Bucky can tolerate, pacing up and down the hall carpet, and brewing endless pots of coffee for Sam. Once or twice he even finds himself praying, praying the way soldiers do where words that once brought comfort of home turn heavy and urgent with fervor and desperation, devotion more instinct than thought. He isn’t sure what he’s praying for, or to whom. 

Another long night passes and around 7am Steve brings Sam’s latest scalding mug of coffee and a box of plain crackers he’s found into the front room where they are holding the Soldier. Steve looks automatically to Bucky first. The man is slumped forwards in the chair, hair hanging low into his face. There is just the faintest glint of his eyes to show he's still awake. Sam looks up from his seat on the couch as Steve enters, rubbing his eyes. He puts the tranq gun down on the coffee table and reaches gratefully for the mug.

"I think there might be more coffee in my arteries than blood right now," Sam says, but he takes the drink, wrapping his hands around the ceramic. "How many cups is this?"

"I've lost count." Steve says sympathetically and nods towards the Winter Soldier, keeping his voice low. "Any change?"

"Nothing," Sam replies low, and wearily accepts the crackers. "He hasn't moved for hours and he won't talk to me at all anymore. I have no idea what is going on in his head right now but I'm not sure it can be good."

"We need a new plan," Steve agrees, moving back from the couch and glancing towards the window, and the distant sunlight outside. "I just don't know what--" 

Suddenly the Winter Soldier moves. He is surging up from the chair, both arms free, a blade flashing in his hand. Steve catches a glimpse of cold nothingness in his eyes before the Soldier kicks the tranq gun off the table into a corner and at the same moment the metal fist crashes into Steve’s still healing jaw. Steve rolls his head back and the blow glances off without doing any real damage, but already a knife is coming up under Steve’s arm; it skitters across his ribs, drawing blood. Steve strikes back as hard and fast as he can, knowing he is fighting for his life. The Soldier  _ will _ kill him if he gets the opening. Sam is yelling and running forwards, even as Steve punches up towards the Soldier's head and the blade bites into his left forearm rather than his throat. He doesn't even have his shield.

The Winter Soldier drops the knife the moment Steve blocks it and spins, bringing the left hand up to catch it just like he did during the ambush at the overpass. But somehow it doesn't work; somehow the metal fingers don’t respond quite fast enough and he fumbles the catch. In that brief moment, Sam tackles him from behind and all three of them go down to the floor. The knife is knocked away. There is a brief, inelegant struggle which results in Sam bleeding from the forehead and Steve almost getting his throat crushed before they manage to get the Soldier pinned face down onto the floor under their combined weights. He turns his face away and goes limp.

"I'll hold him," Steve says, kneeling on the metal arm to keep it trapped. "Grab the cuffs!"

Sam doesn't argue but goes straight over to the chair where the mag cuffs are lying on the floor. It's quickly apparent that while Bucky was looking hurt and beaten in the chair, he had also been slowly working a knife blade in between the magnetic connectors on the cuffs, shorting them out. It's a terrifying reminder that even though they thought they were being watchful and careful, they'd both been lulled by his obvious pain, soothed by his passivity into forgetting that the Winter Soldier is not just a traumatised rescued POW but a captured enemy agent with a deadly mission.

"They still work," Sam says, checking the mag cuffs. He brings them over and clamps them back around the Soldier's wrists. There's a reassuring  _ clunk  _ as the two halves snap together. Sam wipes the blood off his forehead, grimacing.

"Get the knife," Steve says, still not wanting to loosen his grip on the Soldier's limp arms when there's still a weapon lying around.

Sam grabs the discarded knife and holds it up. It's small and wickedly sharp; the blade is as long as his palm and matte black. An assassin's weapon. Not something Bucky could have picked up in the cabin, but they thought they'd already searched him back at the motel.

Sam crouches down next to the Soldier where he's still lying on the floor and holds up the knife. 

"Where did you get this?"

The Soldier doesn't answer. Beneath his hands, Steve can feel the robotic arm vibrating like an idling engine. It’s the first time he’d really touched the thing, other than during a fight. The metal is smooth and cold, brutally neat and unblemished, except for visible dent in the upper bicep. 

"Hey," Sam says again, louder. "Winter Soldier. I'm talking to you.”

There’s still no reply, but now Steve's right up close to the arm he can hear it is emitting a sound; a sharp, metallic whine, just on the edge of his hearing. He remembers the way the Soldier's metal hand hadn't worked right when he'd tried to catch the knife and wonders if the thing is malfunctioning somehow.

"He's not going to talk, Sam," Steve says. Bucky's face is turned away from him but he thinks he knows by now what his expression would be. Blank nothingness. "He must have had that knife this whole time." 

The whole time they've been in this room, and the whole time he was sat behind them in the car, silent and watchful, all the while with that deadly little knife in reach...

"We gotta search him again."

So they do, and the Soldier doesn’t resist or fight back, just lets them manhandle him like a sack of rocks. After a few minutes Steve finds one more blade hidden in a sheath along the Soldier's spine and two four-inch long metal pins in the jacket's Kevlar plating, sharp enough to sever nerves. They dump Bucky back to the chair and he lets them recuff his hands behind the chair back without a struggle. At last they step back. The Soldier slowly raises his chin, looking at them through his curtain of lank hair with eyes that are dead dead dead inside, and in that moment Steve hates HYDRA more than he has ever hated anything before in his life.

Whatever Steve has been hoping and praying for, it's clear Pierce's orders and HYDRA's brainwashing aren't as broken as he thought, and as soon as the Soldier has been disarmed and restrained and they’ve licked their wounds, they fall straight back into the old status quo again. More hours pass. The Soldier sits silent and unmoving in the chair. Sam watches from the couch and Steve brings coffee and paces the hallway carpet. At breakfast time he makes some plain rice but this time the Soldier won't even open his mouth when Sam holds up a plastic spoon to his face. He just blinks, blankly, a faint tremor running through him. Steve doesn't think it's defiance this time, more a lack of comprehension. It's almost as if he has been saving up all of his endurance for that last attempt to kill Steve and now there’s just nothing left in him. Steve watches from the doorway and thinks now he looks more like a ghost than ever. The Soldier seems hollow and strangely thin, as if he might disappear if Steve looked at him from the wrong angle or out of the corner of his eye. But there is that hideous arm, hanging like a dead weight from a shoulder too small to carry it, like an anchor dragging him down, trapping him to this squalid earth. Right now, Bucky’s head is tilting; every now and again he drifts off, exhaustion dragging him into unconsciousness and then he jerks awake again. It’s as if he is afraid to sleep. Something has to give.

Steve finally decides enough is enough. The bedroom behind the lounge is a twin. Sam and Bucky can sleep while Steve keeps watch over them both. Steve shakes Sam back into full consciousness and explains the plan. Then he stays well back. holding the tranq gun trained and ready while Sam detaches Bucky’s cuffs from the chair. Bucky flinches and shakes when Sam hauls him up to his feet, but he doesn't make any move to attack or escape and Sam doesn’t let him go until he is safely deposited on the right-hand bed, furthest from the door. Sam threads the cuffs through the solid iron bed frame and snaps them shut again.

Both Sam and Steve relax the moment the cuffs are secured, but Bucky doesn't; in fact he seems even more agitated. Despite there being plenty of room, Bucky won’t lie down, and Sam's attempts to make him leave him twitching and flinching like a palsy sufferer. In the end they give up, leaving Bucky slumped against the headboard. He’s half curled around his belly; it’s probably aching like crazy from all the puking he’s been doing. 

Sam falls onto the other bed. He just has time to check Steve still has the tranq gun before he’s kicking his boots off and muttering;

“Wake me when shit goes south.”

Then he is instantly asleep, snoring gently into the pillow. 

Bucky is still staring towards Steve, heavy eyed and pale. Steve has no idea what he’s thinking behind that emotionless mask. Is he planning yet another attack? Picturing killing Steve? Analysing more ways to escape? Somehow, he doesn’t think so. Somehow, he can’t imagine Bucky feels very differently to the way Steve himself is feeling, afraid and hurting and nervous as hell. Steve very slowly and carefully backs away from the bed and sits down on the floor several feet away, murmuring a constant litany of _ “ _ You’re safe here, it’s okay Bucky, no-one is going to hurt you, they’ll never get to you again.”

Bucky is still watching him. Steve smiles casually and, keeping the tranq gun close at his side, picks up a ratty book he had grabbed from the bookcase in the living room. It’s some cheap romance novel, not his thing at all, but being occupied with another task will make him look more at ease and maybe put Bucky at ease too.

For a long time, it doesn’t seem to be working. The Soldier stays silent and hypervigilant on the bed, eyes fixed firmly on the tranq gun, unblinking, almost unbreathing. It’s like he’s locked in some kind of strange, intense internal war, as if the very concept of lying down to sleep is so alien to him that he doesn’t understand what to do. The stillness is an eerie echo of the Bucky Steve remembers after Azzano. By the time the Howling Commandos had come together, the war had already hammered out Bucky’s lazy Brooklyn ease, moulding it into a stillness and stealthy calm that let him disappear between one breath and the next; perched in trees or clock towers or rooftops for hour upon hour watching down his rifle for that perfect shot, all without a single extraneous motion. And then, when the mission was over and the day was saved, when the Howlies were camped down somewhere that was the closest approximation to safe they could manage, then they saw the polar opposite. The Bucky that couldn’t sit still, who paced and drank and didn’t sleep for days, whose whole body rattled with excess energy and whose hands shook around endless cigarettes. It had been hard for Steve to witness, perhaps the most difficult thing, amidst all the strangeness and fear and uncertainty of those first few months in Europe, in his new body, at war. To find Bucky, his life’s one constant, so inexorably changed. But Steve had found his feet then, by taking control, being the Captain America that Bucky and the Howlies had needed. And with that realisation, he knows what to do now.

“Bucky. Go to sleep. That’s an order.”

Bucky blinks once, and then melts back against the wall like an icicle under the sun. He is asleep within seconds.

Several hours of blissful silence pass. Steve slips out of the room about 1300 to retrieve his phone, and neither Bucky nor Sam wake up. He knows he owes Nat and Tony a message at least, but what the hell should he say? All either of them know is that Steve and Sam left DC. How does he explain the last two days, the Winter Soldier and Bucky and all of it? And even if he wanted to, would it be safe to put something like that in a text? But Sam had been right before. They’re walking a very fine line here, and another wrong step like this morning and someone could die. Sam could die. After a long deliberation, he realises that as much as he doesn’t want to, someone else needs to know that the Winter Soldier is here, just in case. And the choice of who that person should be isn’t hard. 

STEVE ROGERS: Hey Nat. We’re at the cabin, it's great, really quiet. Met up with an old friend who’s going to hang out with us for a while. The stuff you left with Sam turned out to be useful. Hope it’s nice wherever you are.

To Tony, he just sends a bland greeting, a vague comment about the cabin and a promise to call. He’s not trying to keep secrets, but this isn’t just something he can send in a text. He can’t put his faith in the fact that Tony will understand that it’s best for Bucky if Steve handles this his way. He’s prone to overreacting after all. Neither recipient replies.

Steve watches Bucky sleep. He's lying awkwardly, half sitting against the bedstead with his head pushed up against the rails. It looks horribly uncomfortable but Bucky clearly is too deeply asleep to notice. Steve had expected him to be restless, perhaps even suffer nightmares, but Bucky has been completely silent in his sleep, and unmoving. Steve doesn't know if that is more of a concern or not.

They know a little of what Hydra put Bucky through from the Kiev file, although it was hardly comprehensive, and there are decades of notes missing. But what  _ was  _ in there had made Steve break a lot of things and then go and sit outside the cabin on the steps in the dark for several hours. He doesn’t know how to fix this, any of it, and Sam has already told him that this is so far out of his area of expertise that they aren’t even on the same map. Sam’s a counsellor for combat veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress, not a brainwashing specialist. Steve knows he is going to be even less help, still trying to get a handle on how much psychiatry has changed from his own time when battle fatigue was considered at best a result of exhaustion, and at worse, a sign of poor moral fibre. Getting to know Sam back in DC before any of this madness had started and sitting in some of his sessions had opened Steve's eyes a little. Sam was a good counsellor, and while he had been talking to Steve as a friend and not as a patient, Steve had already been re-evaluating his own experiences during the war in a new light. 

Be that as it may, Steve knows he’s barely scratched the surface of understanding what’s going on here, and even if he did, that wasn't going to be enough. What Bucky has been through...there has never been anything comparable. Helping him is going to be a monumental task. Steve suspects Sam already thinks it can’t be done, even with professional help. Sam has all but told Steve that the Bucky Barnes he remembers probably no longer exists. But Steve is not going to stand for that. Bucky remembered him on the helicarrier. The Soldier had denied it, but Steve had seen it in his eyes. Then, he’d saved Steve’s life on the river bank. And now, Bucky’s body has come back. His mind and his memories will follow. Even if it takes the rest of their lives to figure it out. He will get Bucky back.

Steve is reading up online about brainwashing during the Cold War when he happens to glance up and realises with a start that Bucky is awake and watching him. Sam is still asleep, breathing slow and even, so this is the first time Steve and Bucky have been alone since Bucky attacked him in the motel. Steve smiles at Bucky cautiously, but the other man doesn't even meet his eyes. He is staring fixedly at Steve’s torso, hooded eyes watching every move. Steve slowly gets to his feet and stretches, making sure to stay out of the range of Bucky’s legs should the other man lash out at him. But Bucky makes no movement and just watches, impassively.

“Hey Bucky,” Steve says, low. “Sleep well?”

The Soldier doesn’t reply, of course. But he shifts his gaze around the room, taking in the closed door and window, the tranq gun still on the floor, and Sam’s sleeping form. His eyes settle back on Steve. Not meeting his gaze, just resting centre mass.

“How are you feeling?” Steve asks, warily, reading for an attack.

Bucky, to Steve's surprise, looks like he is actually considering the question. Then, even more surprisingly, he answers.

“Report. Asset function compromised beyond acceptable limits. Mission suspended. Behavioural correction in process. Maintenance required. med tech required.”

Steve gapes. Then he tries to process what he had just been told and not focus on the fact that it’s the most words he has heard from his friend in 70 years.

“’Mission suspended’? What does that mean, Buck?”

“Asset function compromised,” the Soldier repeats, staring past Steve’s shoulder.

“The Asset...that’s you, right? That must mean you're injured. And maintenance...for the arm. It’s not working properly, is it? That’s why you couldn’t ki- why you dropped your knife the other day.”

Bucky’s face twists for a second; an ugly, pained grimace; and then returns to its blank state.

“Affirmative.”

“All right,” Steve says, filing that away. “Your mission, then. What can you tell me about that?” He knows the Winter Soldier had been sent to kill him, and Natasha too, but it won’t hurt to confirm that there’s nothing else they haven’t anticipated. This isn’t the time for surprises.

“Two targets, level six,” Bucky recites. “Steven Rogers, alias Captain America. Natalia Alianovna Romanova, alias Black Widow. Allied. Affiliations: SHIELD, the Avengers, the KG-”

“Okay,” Steve interrupts. “Okay, Bucky. That’s enough.” He thinks fast.  _ Mission suspended. _ And then,  _ You are my mission.  _ The Winter Soldier has tried four times now to kill him, and has gotten close, too. And now he’s, what, giving up? Steve is desperate to think it’s because he is remembering. But the answer itself has already been given in Bucky’s automaton words. The Soldier is outnumbered and outgunned, and too tired and injured for his mission to succeed. He’s too hurt to successfully kill Steve.

“Okay,” Steve says, needing to be very clear on what he is being told. “If I understand you, you are saying that you wouldn’t succeed in your mission right now because you are injured and the arm is damaged. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What about Sam? Do you have to kill him too?”

“Outside mission parameters.”

“And what about when you are properly rested and healed up?”

“Mission will proceed as ordered once sufficient function is restored.”

_ Jesus. _ Steve feels something buzzing inside his head, like screeching metal, far off. It's a sharp little shard of panic he hasn't felt since he woke up in Times Square, surrounded by the garish glare of LED screens in the place of poster paint billboards and twinkling yellow bulbs. There's no time for it now either. He has to focus only on Bucky. 

Steve glances at his watch. The two have been asleep for about six hours, which is more rest than he thought they would get. He looks over at Sam. The man is still out cold, breathing deeply. Steve can’t ask any more of him for the time being. He turns back to Bucky, takes a deep breath, and tucks the tranq gun into his pants.

“I figure you probably have to take a leak, so I’m going to take you to the bathroom,” Steve says. “And I really hope that this ‘Mission Suspended’ stuff isn’t a load of crap.” Not that it seems likely Bucky is capable of bullshitting anyone right now.

Bucky flinches so violently when Steve approaches that he almost rethinks the entire endeavour. He wants to trust Bucky, but he can’t help being a little tense after the number of times Bucky has tried to kill him in the last three weeks. But Bucky is quiet and compliant as Steve unfastens the cuffs and refastens then again behind his back again without a hint of resistance. Steve leads him into the bathroom, and removes the cuffs once more again. Bucky instantly starts fumbling with the waistband of his borrowed sweatpants; he hasn’t yet shown any sensibilities of modesty but Steve steps back out into the hall to give him some privacy anyway. They have to treat Bucky like a person if they want him to start remembering that he is one. But even then Steve leaves the bathroom door open because it would be very, very foolish to let the Winter Soldier completely out of his sight, and Steve might be hopelessly naive and painfully optimistic, but he’s not an idiot. After several minutes, he hears the faucet, and when it is still running over sixty seconds later, he glances inside. Bucky is standing at the sink, letting the water run over his hand. He looks almost as if he’s checked out again mentally, but Steve can see his eyes moving as he watches the water spiral down the drain.

“All done?” Steve asks, wondering again what is going on in Bucky’s head. Bucky doesn’t reply, but he shifts his hand, letting the water run down his wrist. Then he sighs, and turns off the faucet. Turns to face Steve with his eyes down and hands at his sides. Waiting.

Steve takes another gamble. “You know, there’s a shower here you can use later. Loads of hot water. You could even wash your hair. If you want.”

Bucky tilts his head a little, but Steve can see him thinking. After a long time, Bucky nods, and Steve wants to cheer. Instead he just smiles, and says:

“Sure thing, buddy. But right now I'm so hungry I could eat a horse. Pretty sure we are going to have one similarly starving ex-pararescueman on our hands when Sam wakes up. So, food first?"

Bucky moves then, and Steve tenses until he realises Bucky is just holding out his wrists, ready for the shackles. Steve looks at them for a moment, and thinks  _ what the hell. _ He puts the cuffs back into his pocket and really, really hopes he hasn't just signed his own death warrant.

“Come on,” Steve says, and sets off towards the kitchen. “Let’s go scare up some food.”

Without a word, Bucky meekly follows. 

Once they arrive, Steve pulls out a few pots and pans, and starts raiding the cupboards. It was clear from what Sam said that no-one had been up to the cabin in months. Before Bucky has crashed into their lives, Steve and Sam had intended on heading into the local town to stock up on some supplies as soon as they'd settled in, but then the need to maintain a 24-hour guard on a brainwashed assassin had thrown that plan out of the window. Despite the fact that it’s nearly four in the afternoon, Steve could murder a decent all-American breakfast right now. Unfortunately, without fresh supplies, they're stuck with what Sam’s friend Mitch had left in the pantry.

Steve pulls out a few canned vegetables, some spices and some sort of...wait, is that Spam? They still make that? He stacks it all on the table next to the dried beans Sam put out to soak last night and considers their options. Steve is a hopeless cook. He’s confident he’d still be a hopeless cook even if he had had a recipe, all the correct ingredients, a fully equipped restaurant kitchen and an advice panel of expert chefs. But hopefully Sam won’t care. Not like Bucky used to; God, the complaining...

Speaking of Bucky, Steve can see him out of the corner of his eye, hovering in the kitchen doorway.

“You can come in,” Steve says to him. “Sit down if you like.”

Bucky looks ready to fall down but if he is sitting at the table, Steve can at least make sure he is well away from the kitchen knives at all times. Bucky does indeed come in, but instead of taking one of the kitchen chairs, he sits on the floor behind the table with his back to the wall. He draws his knees up to his chest, rests his arm on top, and pushes his face into the metal so only his eyes are showing. Steve's not particularly happy – Bucky’s chosen position means Steve has to turn his back on him to use the stove-top, but they’ve been attempting this new trust thing for ten minutes so far and he’s not dead yet. Might as well carry on pushing his luck.

Steve turns back to his ingredients and to a small pile of cans and jars on the sideboard that have already been separated out from the rest. The Kiev file, with its description of nasal feeding tubes and liquid nutrient supplements, had prepared them a little for the problems Bucky was going to have with food. While Sam had been watching Bucky, Steve had already raided all the supplies in the house and separated out anything he thought might not be too harsh on Bucky’s stomach, but the only things Bucky's managed to keep down so far has been stuff he can drink - watery soups little more than dissolved bouillon cubes, and cups of diluted juice. Every time they try to make him eat anything more substantial, Bucky will swallow a few spoonfuls and then cry silently until he pukes. Steve is desperately worried about it. Back during the War, he heard about POWs and civilians who had survived the Nazi work camps only to die when their well-meaning rescuers fed them candy and chocolate; too much stress on their starved bodies. Whatever method HYDRA was using to keep him fighting fit, Bucky clearly hasn’t really eaten much of anything for weeks.

In the ‘Bucky’s food’ pile, there’s a few canned soups, more stock cubes, a bag of polenta, some applesauce, white rice... Steve’s hand hovers, but in the end he picks out a can of sweet condensed milk. The packaging has changed, of course, but he remembers that from 1943 as well. Maybe Bucky will too.

As he haphazardly throws ingredients together in lieu of real cooking, Steve talks. He doesn’t know if Bucky is listening; the man never makes a sound. When he throws a glance in his direction, Bucky is still huddled behind his knees, staring into the middle distance. But Steve talks anyway; about Peggy, about the War, about their old neighbourhood in Brooklyn and how so much has changed in the world, and yet how so much is still the same. He feels better, more grounded, but Bucky still says nothing.

After about thirty minutes, Sam appears in the doorway. He shuffles his feet and yawns ostentatiously just before he steps into sight; a courtesy so that no-one is startled by his arrival. He leans against the frame, looking well-rested and casual, but even though Steve has only known Sam for, God, not even two months, he can tell that Sam is as tense as a coiled spring. Sam’s voice is as laid-back as his body language, but his eyes are fixed on Bucky.

“Man, I needed that. Haven’t crashed that hard in years. What time even is it?”

“You don’t want to know.” Steve answers lightly, stirring the pot. “Here, you’re just in time. Bucky and I made breakfast. Though as it’s almost evening and this meal contains zero-percent breakfast foods, I can’t really justify calling it that. Also I can’t cook worth a damn, so grab a plate and take your chances.”

“Haven’t known you long, Rogers, but I could definitely have called that one. You really don’t seem like the domestic type.”

Sam walks into the room, even though Steve can tell he doesn’t want to be a step closer to Bucky than he has to be. Beyond a flicker of his eyes, Bucky himself has paid no attention to Sam’s arrival, and instead is staring at a crack in the floorboards.

“What’s going on, man?” Sam asks in a soft undertone when he reaches Steve’s side. “You do know he’s not cuffed, right?” He takes down some plates to cover the sound of their conversation, though that's probably pointless. Steve quickly and quietly fills Sam in on his apparent truce with the Winter Soldier. Sam doesn’t look convinced.

“How do you know this isn’t a trap?”

“I just gotta have faith, Sam.”

They can’t convince Bucky to come and sit at the table while they eat, so Steve puts the mug of warm watered-down condensed milk near Bucky’s feet until he’s ready to take it. Steve and Sam both wolf down the spam, bean and tomato stew thing Steve has created.

“Wow,” Sam says, after scraping the last of the distressingly  _ crunchy _ beans into his mouth and chewing, thoughtfully. “That was actually not that bad, Steve. I guess necessity really is the mother of invention.”

Steve nods, pleasantly surprised himself. “First time for everything. Never thought we’d see the day when I actually cooked something edible, right, Buck?”

_ “Stevie, you could burn water,” _ is what he expects to hear. _Longs_ to ear. Instead, there’s just silence.

They make Buck drink the milk very slowly over a long time, followed by a whole bottle of water. He retches a few times but isn’t actually sick, and there are only a few silent tears before it’s over. It’s so small a success that some might consider it barely a victory at all, but to Steve’s mind, any little thing they can claw back from HYDRA is a triumph. Bucky has been uncuffed for two hours; Sam and Bucky have slept, everyone has eaten, and no-one is dead. Fuck you, Alexander Pierce.

After they’ve cleared the table and Sam’s finished the dishes, Steve crouches down until he's at Bucky's eye level. “Bucky, you still up for that shower?”

For Sam's benefit, he clarifies. “Bucky was looking at the water in the bathroom earlier. I thought he might want to take a wash.” He turns back to Bucky. “I think you’ll feel better. But only if you want.”

Bucky doesn’t answer, but he does get to his feet. Steve takes that as a silent ‘yes’ and leads the way back to the bathroom. Sam follows them without a word, because that’s who he is. God bless Sam Wilson.

Once they arrive, it is clear that a bath is a much more practical option than showering. Bucky needs to wash his hair and, with his metal arm possibly malfunctioning, it’s going to be much easier if someone else helps, and that person is going to get much less wet this way. 

Once the water starts sloshing into the tub, Bucky seems to figure out what’s going on, and takes Steve’s  _ “You’re going to need to take some of those clothes off, buddy”  _ as an order. He strips off his boots and pants without any sense of modesty, but it's as he's sliding out of his jacket that he suddenly pauses. His left arm is raised to shoulder height but seems to be stuck. They can all hear the whirring of servos and buzzing gears somewhere inside and the scratch of the plates realigning, but the damn thing just won’t move. Steve can see the problem – Bucky’s undone all the stupid buckles on the front of the jacket but there’s a clip at the back of his neck that holds the tac harness in place and Bucky can’t reach it.

“Hey man, I can help you with that,” Sam says, quietly. “Just say the word.”

Bucky says nothing, and continues to struggle for almost a full minute, fighting the arm’s stiffness.

“I want to help,” Sam adds, when they can both see Bucky’s frustration. “But I said I wouldn’t touch you without your permission. If you want me to help, you’re gonna have to say so.”

Just when Steve is starting to think they might just have to help, permission or not, Bucky jerks his head in what might be a nod. Sam steps forward and releases the buckle. Bucky shakes the jacket off, and fumbles out of the grimy black t-shirt he’s wearing under it. Then, without warning, he sort of shudders and then he’s  _ gone _ . Sam calls  _ “ _ Winter?” a few times, and taps on his flesh arm, but Bucky doesn’t respond. He is fully catatonic again.

Steve hesitates, wondering if they ought to abandon washing. Both of them very much do not want to do things to Bucky’s person while Bucky is not around to consent to it. Sam seems reluctant too, but he does point out that this washing process is going to involve a lot of touching, and the dissociation is a defence mechanism. For now it might just be best to let Bucky be safe in his own head while they clean him and fix him up. They’ll have to address this at some point, but that time is definitely not now. It feels wrong, to both of them, but what doesn’t these days?

Before they begin, they sit Bucky down on the edge of the tub to quickly check him over. Steve doesn’t know where to start. Bucky is filthy and he stinks, and he’s so  _ thin _ . Steve could comfortably fit his thumb into the hollow between each rib. The skin itself is smooth though and bears no discolouration. In fact, apart from the line of thick scarring around the seam of the arm, Bucky has no scars. Plenty of bruises, but no scars at all. That should feel like a good thing, but it doesn’t, not when they know some of what Bucky has suffered. There was a short section in the Kiev file describing the medical events affecting the Soldier during the 1970s alone – a bullet in the thigh, stab wounds, blunt force trauma, internal injuries, whippings - but there is not a mark on Bucky’s skin to show for it, apart from that monstrosity of an arm. Whatever torments he suffered, the serum has wiped his flesh clean every time, just as the electroconvulsive shocks and cocktail of reality-altering drugs seem to have done to his mind. The true trauma lurks more than skin deep. 

And that itself raises another concern. They know next to nothing about the knock-off serum that Zola dosed Bucky with, but given that he survived multiple events of cryogenic freezing and the traumatic loss of his arm, the healing factor of the HYDRA serum must be at least as strong as that of Erskine’s – maybe stronger. It is therefore quite clear that, for some reason, Bucky is no longer healing as well as he should be. Bucky still has injuries from the Triskelion battle nine days ago; in that same time, Steve has almost completely recovered from three life-threatening bullet wounds, near drowning and a broken jaw. But Bucky still bears bruising and contusions across his body, particularly across his chest and legs where the beam fell. His right shoulder is still swollen. Then there’s the glancing bullet wound that Sam gave him back at the motel. It's tacky and swollen, barely closed. 

But more unsettling than all of these is a strange injury on Bucky’s back on the left side, below the scarred seam where the metal arm meets flesh. The skin is discoloured deep purple and black in a swathe across Bucky’s ribs, a patch as big as both of Steve’s palms. The top of the area is marked with three little dark circles. Steve brushes his hand over the wound; it doesn’t feel too distended, but it's hot to the touch and he can feel something hard raised up under the skin where the dark patches are. They feel like nail heads.

“Might just be a bad bruise,” he says, uncertain.

“Might be internal bleeding,” Sam replies. “Could be serious. He needs to be in a hospital, Steve.”

Bucky gives a sudden all-over shudder at that, and Steve wonders if Bucky is more aware than he seems. He shoots Sam a quick glance and the other man doesn't say anything more, whatever he’s thinking. Between them, they maneuver Bucky into the tub where Steve gives his friend a quick and efficient scrub, and then washes his hair. Sam sits out of the way on the toilet lid, fiddling with his phone. Steve is just grateful he’s here. Bucky is soon much cleaner than the water, with the exception of the arm which has dirt and blood and God only knows what wedged between the plates. Steve does not touch the thing, though he does visually inspect the damaged portion in the upper arm he noticed before. Two of the large plates have buckled, forcing at least three smaller ones out of position. It was probably Steve’s own shield that did that damage, back on the helicarrier. It’s no real surprise that Bucky is having trouble moving it.

Sam helps Steve haul Bucky out of the filthy water before his skin starts to prune, and then dresses the worst of Bucky's cuts and abrasions. They tape an ice pack to his black ribs and another to his shoulder. Bucky has already used up all of Steve’s spare clothing, so they dress him in a set of Sam’s sweatpants and an old t-shirt that they have to split up the shoulder to get the arm in. As for the rest of him, Bucky’s not a small guy any more, and there is really no way Sam’s stuff should fit him. But he’s just so thin.

Be that as it may, it’s clear that they are going to need more supplies if they are going to make this work. Clothes for Bucky. Fresh groceries. First aid supplies. Beer (Steve's suggestion) or wine (Sam's). They prod Bucky back out into the lounge and lie him down on the couch while they wait for him to come back round from wherever his mind has gone to. Steve cleans up the bathroom, and gathers up the Winter Soldier’s discarded gear. He resists the urge to hurl the jacket and boots into a fire, and instead, he places them at the foot of the couch where Bucky can see them when he comes to. Sam doesn’t make any comment about it, but neither does he mention the cuffs again.

Now he’s seen what Bucky looks like with the false bulk of the body armour stripped away, Steve can’t get the sight of those prominent ribs out of his mind. There’s so much wrong with the Winter Soldier that dealing with any of it seems almost insurmountable, but the fact that Bucky is barely able to eat anything has to be their immediate concern. The serum meant that Steve’s metabolism is highly efficient and he can last a lot longer than a non-enhanced human without any nutrients at all; he learned that during the war. But based on the experiments that SHIELD had put him through after the ice, they worked out that if he’s under strain - having to fight a lot or heal from an injury, for example - then he needs about 6000 calories a day to stay healthy. Bucky is managing maybe about 200 calories at the moment. If they can’t fix this he is going to starve to death in front of their eyes, long before the drug withdrawal or psychological trauma become relevant factors. 

“We can look in town,” Sam says doubtfully, when Steve brings it up. “Walmart is Walmart, but I’m willing to bet even they don’t sell specialist starvation therapy foods. Might be health protein shakes or something, but they're generally designed for losing calories, not packing them on.”

Steve considers. “Think we could order something online...?”

Sam looks thoughtful for a second, then pulls out his phone, swiping across the screen as he talks. “I’m trying to remember, but I’m sure I saw something online back in the summer...these scientists won an award for this stuff they invented for use in famines. It was basically baby formula but with a full complement of vitamins and an adult-size load of calories. I wonder if it’s available for sale to the public, or-- Ah, here it is."

He holds the phone out for Steve to see. One the screen is a news article with the headline “ _ Famine relief inventors win top humanitarian prize” _ and a photo of six young people posing in front of a large banner, shaking hands. And on the banner…

“Stark Industries,” Steve points out.

“Oh, yeah. Wow. So how does that work, do you have contacts there, or…?”

Of course it was Stark Industries. Well, it was inevitable that Steve was going to have to stop avoiding Tony sooner or later. They haven’t spoken properly since SHIELD imploded, since Howard Stark and Peggy’s legacies were dragged through the mud, and now Steve is sheltering a former HYDRA agent. But maybe this was just the universe giving Steve a push, telling him the time has come to stop hiding. If they needed that formula for Bucky, then Steve was just going to have to do what was necessary to try and get it, no matter how difficult the conversation with Tony was going to be. 

"It does sound exactly like what he needs,” Steve agrees at last. “Yeah, I happen to know a guy...Leave it with me. ” 

As Steve’s walking out of the room with the phone at his ear and waiting for JARVIS to connect the call, Steve hears Sam muttering under his breath:

“He has Tony Stark on freaking speed dial. Of course he does. What even is my life right now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everyone who read, left kudos or commented! I really love hearing what you think.  
> Big love x


	5. Sam

So, it seems life has taken a turn for the interesting. A little  _ too  _ interesting if Sam’s being blunt. Steve is hovering somewhere on the emotional wreck scale between piss-poor decisionmaking and having a full breakdown; his formerly dead, horribly traumatised, maybe psychotic 96-year-old best friend Bucky Barnes has gone from attempted murder to catatonic stupor in just a few hours; and Sam is stuck out here in the hills with the pair of them, miles from civilisation, and so far out of his depth that he isn’t even sure when he last had a firm foothold. But he’ll keep treading water as long as he can, and they’re all keeping their heads up. For now, anyway.

After the bath, Barnes stays in his catatonic state for nearly five hours before he suddenly relaxes, closes his eyes and seems to fall asleep. Once Steve returns from his lengthy phone call, he hangs around uselessly for another hour before Sam eventually persuades him to go to bed, too. Steve needs sleep too for all that he’s apparently just managed the near miraculous, having wrangled a promise of assistance without interference out of Tony Stark. Sam gathers from the way Steve recounts it that this was a fairly unexpected outcome, and honestly if Sam was in Stark’s shoes he can’t imagine he’d have been happy to hear Steve had holed himself up with the Hydra agent that had come damn near to putting him in the ground just nine days ago either. But there’s probably not a single person in the world that could compete with Steve Rogers when it came to sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness, and so he got what he wanted; a Stark Industries courier drone will be arriving in less than 12 hours with a package of famine formula but Iron Man and presumably the other Avengers will keep their distance. 

So Steve finally disappears to the bedroom to at least make a pretence at resting while Sam sits in the worn armchair beside the old couch and watches Barnes silently sleep. Barnes’ condition is both better and worse than he had suspected when they started off down this road. Better in that the assassin seems to have broken out of his brainwashing astonishingly fast, if Steve is right about what his new compliance and lack of violence means; worse, because shaking off the former mind control has left him essentially unable to function. It seems like Barnes can’t talk, eat or even sleep without orders. He’s a shell, and he needs to be in a secure psychiatric ward with professional help. Not in a cabin in the woods with a couple of well-meaning but essentially clueless fellow vets. What the hell are they doing? They'd ended up here because Sam had followed Steve’s lead again because it just feels natural, but sooner or later that always seems to end up with Sam getting shot at.

Barnes wakes up again at about 0430 hours and Sam kind of nervously guides him into the bathroom. Steve does seem to have been right about the cuffs though – Barnes is almost less of the threat without them. It is as if, without their constant reminder, he has forgotten that he is their captive. As if, without that defined role, he has no purpose anymore. The death glares that the Winter Soldier subjected Sam to before have become unfocussed staring, and the only automatic movement he makes is flinching every time Sam steps closer than five feet. But so long as Sam keeps a reasonable distance away, Barnes seems content to listlessly follow Sam's instructions in the bathroom and then trail after him back to the lounge, where he walks a quick perimeter of the room, examining doors and windows. When Sam tells him to sit, he bypasses both the couch and the chair and drops to the floor, pressed right up against the wall in the corner. Sam doesn’t argue. So long as he’s not attacking anyone he can sit wherever he damn well chooses, as far as Sam’s concerned.

Right. Step Two - medical treatment. With much flinching and shaking from Barnes, Sam manages to inch close enough into the guy’s apparently massive bubble of personal space to peel off the old single-use adhesive ice packs they had stuck onto Barnes’s ribs the previous evening. They have become warm and liquid overnight, only good for the trash. Sam fishes the last unused one out of the first aid kit and cracks the pod inside, feeling the ice start to freeze. Barnes is curled up on the floor in his corner, arms and knees folded in tight and head down, body language that radiates  _ don’t fucking touch me  _ as loud as if he was yelling it. Sam doesn’t want to ignore any type of communication, no matter how small, so he keeps his distance as he slides the ice pack across the floor towards the guy. 

“Here. Do you want to put this on your side, where it’s hurting?”

No response. 

“Come on, Winter, it's not gonna bite you. Just take it.”

Reluctantly, Barnes unfolds and picks up the ice pack and then suddenly he goes still. He’s staring at the frozen packet like he’s just been handed a severed limb. Sam tries to stay calm, wondering what has happened in Barnes’ head. Should Sam stay completely still? Or get the fuck out of the way?

“Hey, man, what’s going on?” he says, quietly. “It’s just an ice pack, okay? It’ll help your side hea-...”

An ice pack. He’s just given the Winter Soldier, subjected to decades of torturous cryogenic freezing, a goddamn ice pack. Shit.  _ Shit. _ If he has just triggered some kind of epic flashback then they are gonna need Steve in here pretty damn quick-

Before Sam can open his mouth to yell for help, Barnes moves, but it is only to pull up the hem of his t-shirt and then press the ice pack hard against his bruised side. He lets out a breathy little shiver, and then drops the shirt again. Then he brings his knees up, rests his prosthetic arm on top and hides his face.

Sam breathes out in relief and as he starts to move away, he hears Barnes say  “Cпасибо.”

_ Thank you _ , reads the voice translation app on his phone. Meltdown averted. Alertness, vocalisation, physical contact, and now interpersonal communication. It’s a good morning, up until Sam hands Barnes a bowl of soup. 

It’s chicken noodle, or it was until Sam had painstakingly strained all the bits out, and now it’s barely more than a thin, hot broth. But it’s got a rich, comfortingly meaty smell, and Sam hopes that, like the condensed milk, maybe it’ll be familiar and simple enough that Barnes will drink it and keep it down. 

No such luck. Sam has to order him to eat again and Barnes barely manages two spoonfuls before bloated tears are welling out of his eyes, and his breathing goes uneven, almost hyperventilating. Sam feels like the worst kind of asshole every time they have to order the guy to eat. It couldn’t be more obvious that it is traumatic for Barnes. It’s a weird and unsettling sight – even without the anti-glare eye paint, body armour or array of weaponry, he still looks every inch the Winter Soldier. It's the unnatural stillness of his body, the robotic silence, the way any expressions are hidden behind that mask of black hair. And yet here is the world’s deadliest assassin, trembling every time he has to lift a spoon to his mouth and crying like his heart is breaking. It's fucked up, what's been done to him, what Sam and Steve are still doing to him. But right now, they don’t have a choice.

So far, Barnes has drunk all the water and juice they have put in front of him, so his hydration has to be improving despite all the vomiting. But Sam knows they have to get some proper calories into him soon, or this shit is gonna get really serious. He has his theories about the constant vomiting, of course. Top of the list is sudden withdrawal from the cocktail of drugs HYDRA was using to keep Barnes compliant. Withdrawal from some substances can be brutal, even deadly. Or it could be that Barnes’s digestive system can’t actually process real food anymore, thanks to the tube feeding the Kiev file described. Or there’s option three: this is a psychological reaction to trauma and stress. Any one of those they can probably handle, with time. But if it's all three? That's a different level of crap.

It’ll be a few hours before the famine formula arrives, but if Barnes can keep that down it might help prevent him dropping dead in front of their eyes. But only if he can drink it on his own - more force-feeding isn't going to do jack for his psychological welfare. And if Barnes doesn’t stop vomiting soon, he’s going to start tearing holes in his stomach and throat, particularly if he’s not healing properly. It isn't the first time Sam has wondered if the two aren't related, in the big tangled mess that is Bucky Barnes. Perhaps if they can get Barnes’ caloric intake back up to something reasonable, it’ll kickstart the serum enough that his body will begin to heal itself again. They just have to get past this pretty major crisis point first.

Barnes is still crying silently as he eats the soup, and he only gets through about six or seven spoonfuls before the spoon falls from his hand, and he’s twisting sideways and puking into the trash can Sam has placed nearby. Sam curses silently, and waits well out of reach until Barnes has finished heaving; they know better by now than to try and touch him when he’s upchucking. Sam waits until it seems like Barnes is done, but even that apparently isn’t long enough. The moment he steps closer, Barnes goes all stiff and then hurls the soup bowl so fast and so precisely at him that Sam only just manages to duck out of the way. By the time he turns back, Barnes is wedged in the corner, eyes wild and glassy. He’s got the spoon held up defensively across his chest like a blade and he’s cursing up a storm in Russian, and there’s nothing Sam can do.

Sam can’t get anywhere near him for hours, and by the time Steve wakes up about 7 am, Sam has to admit that even he is starting to reach the end of his pretty long tether. He needs a break.

So when Barnes has finally calmed down, and Sam and Steve have been able to eat something and finally get a cup of desperately needed coffee, Sam is the one who heads out towards the town to bring in their new supplies. He doesn’t feel guilty about leaving Steve alone with Barnes. Sam has been a counsellor for long enough to know how vital it is for caregivers to take some time apart as well before they get totally burned out. It’s been, what, only four days since Barnes attacked them in the motel, but it feels like a lifetime already. Barnes is going to be a pretty massive commitment, he can see that right now.

So no, he doesn’t feel guilty as he guides Tessa’s car round the rutted track that leads down to the main road. Which is not to say he doesn’t feel concerned. Steve is pretty much fully fit again, while Barnes is currently a shitshow. If the Winter Soldier does resurface, Sam would hope that Steve would be able to handle him alone. He has the cuffs and tranq gun too; it’s just a question of whether he’d pull the trigger if the time came. Sam doesn’t know, and he’s certain that Steve doesn’t. His head ain’t in a good place, and now there’s Barnes to factor in too, and Sam is kind of concerned. He's usually a pretty chill guy, but ever since meeting Steve Rogers, 'concerned' had basically become his default state. Barnes should be in a secure hospital; he’s sick, really sick. Sam wonders why he is continuing to let Steve keep up this pretence that Bucky is improving, and how long before he puts his foot down and forces Steve to get Barnes to the help he needs.

Apparently a little while longer yet. He’s just too goddamn tired to go up against Steve Rogers right now.

While the other two were sleeping, Sam had written up a shopping list of what stuff they are going to need now they are in this for the long haul and he thinks it through as he drives. It takes about fifty minutes to drive to the nearest town. It’s ironically called Salvation, and has a population so small it has probably barely doubled in the past hundred years. Too small for the kind of giant Wal-Mart or Target that would sell everything they need in one place, but there’s a few different stores scattered along the main street, and so he parks up.

Clothing first – Barnes needs some easy comfortable clothes to wear that don’t scream either ‘deadly assassin’ or ‘escaped psych-ward lunatic’. There’s a discount store at the end of the row, so Sam picks out a few pairs of sweatpants, a pack of plain t-shirts, underwear and socks, two pairs of gloves and two hoodies, all in a neutral grey or dark blue. Nothing in  _ STRIKE team black _ , but nothing too boldly coloured either until Barnes is capable of giving his own preferences. From a more touristy store he gets a pair of cheap running shoes so Barnes can ditch the reeking tatty combat boots, and also extra blankets so they can make up the couch in the front room as a third bed; at some point they might all be able to sleep at the same time. A pharmacy provides first aid supplies, a toothbrush and a load of reusable ice packs as Barnes seemed okay with them.

Then Sam hits up the small food mart. They’ve used up a load of Mitch’s food over the last few days and they need to stock up the cabin’s kitchen and pantry. He grabs a load of canned goods, some fresh veggies, and then a bottle of pancake batter, the least crappy-looking bacon he can find and about three dozen eggs. If he has to eat one more of Steve’s bizarre breakfast creations, he is not going to be responsible for the consequences. 

Now to find something that Barnes will eat. Sam wants to get something as a back-up in case Tony Stark’s courier doesn’t show, or in case Barnes finds the magic formula unpalatable. Sam’s already intending to try Barnes on mashed potatoes – he read somewhere that butter and potatoes provide most of the nutrition a body needs. He wanders up and down the aisle for a while, wondering what else might work, when he spots the baby food. It’s nutritious, easy to swallow and easy to digest. Sure, a supersoldier ought to be eating about 40 of the little jars just to stay mobile, but even just one would be an improvement for Barnes right now. Sam tosses in a dozen different flavours into the cart. Just to be on the safe side, he also throws in a large jar of vitamin supplement pills.

About 1300 Sam calls Steve to check how things are going, and it’s good news. For one thing, Steve confirms Barnes still hasn't shown any inclination to start up stabbing people again - there was apparently a minor incident earlier when Steve accidentally startled him, but the guy calmed down without attacking. Barnes has also been more alert than yesterday, and Steve reports he's been following from room to room and starting to show some interest in his surroundings. Lunch consisted of half a jar of applesauce that has, as yet, stayed down.

Sam doubles back to the store and buys three more jars of applesauce.

He doesn’t hurry back to the cabin after he’s done. Sounds like Steve doesn’t need him right now, and one part of the reason for going out was to get a decent break from the drama. Sam flirts with the hot redhead cashier in the grocery store who tells him of a place that does a great sourdough sub two blocks over. He buys a sub and coffee to go, and heads out across the street into a patch of scrubby grass claiming to be the city park. The sun is still bright but it isn’t as warm as it has been so far this fall. Up here near the state forest and the border there is a clear bite of winter to the air, even this early in November, and he’s glad of his jacket. Sam eats, enjoying some peace and watching the birds weave and dive overhead. He misses his wings. He misses Riley. He even misses DC, for fuck’s sake. Salvation seems nice enough, but God, he couldn’t live here. It’s as quiet as death.

It’s about 1600 and he’s about ready to head back when his phone buzzes. Sam digs his phone out of a pocket and sees it’s Steve.

“Hey man, what’s up? If you just remembered something else you want, you’re out of luck; I think the store closed already.”

There is only silence from the other end of the line.

“Steve?”

Sam stares at the phone for a second, wondering if it’s a pocket dial. Then he realises he can hear breathing, and it’s familiar.

“Barn- I mean, Winter?”

There is a very faint sound from the other end of the line, like a hum. Sam’s stomach turns.

“Winter, is that you?” He keeps his voice as steady as he can. “It’s Sam. Can I talk to Steve, please?”

Nothing. Alarm bells start ringing in Sam’s mind and he starts to run. He reaches the car, pulls open the driver’s door and dives into the front seat.

“Come on, man. Talk to me; what’s going on?”

There is another faint hum, and then Barnes speaks.

_ “Mission assistance. Med tech required.” _

“Med tech- Is Steve hurt?” Sam’s stomach is doing backflips. He throws the car into reverse and pulls out into the street. “It’s okay; just tell me what happened.”

_ “Med tech required.”  _ Barnes says again, and now Sam can hear the tension in his voice. Barnes is afraid.

“I’m on my way,” Sam says, already speeding through the town towards the distant hills. “I’ll be there in forty minutes, okay? I want you to stay on the line, Winter. Don’t hang u-“

A click. Barnes is gone.

Sam drives nearly twice the speed limit and tries to call Steve’s phone back eight times. It goes to voicemail every time. He spends the 32 minutes it takes him to get back to the cabin in horrible speculation, palms sweating against the steering wheel, seeing every possible scenario from the most likely (the Winter Soldier’s brainwashing took over again and he stabbed Steve to death with a steak knife) to the bizarre (Steve tripped over a loose brick in the yard and fell down an abandoned mine shaft). He shouldn't have left them alone. The guessing is pointless, and the self-recriminations even more so, but Sam can’t help it. He needs to be prepared for whatever he is about to find.

It’s getting gloomy as he reaches the side turn for the mile-long gravel track up to the cabin. Sam slams on the brakes as the car’s headlights illuminate something in the gravel - the clear tracks of another vehicle turning up the track. Too wide to be a car, it’s a van or an SUV maybe. What Sam can’t tell is if the vehicle also came back down. Either way, Steve has had unexpected visitors.

He sets off slowly up the track, killing his headlights in the hope he’ll see another car before it sees him. The driveway makes a sharp bend around a rocky outcrop about one quarter mile from the house, and Sam can see from the tracks where the larger vehicle stopped, and several boot tracks disappeared into the forest towards the house. Bringing an unknown vehicle up the drive would obviously alert the occupants; best cut the engine out of earshot and head up to the target on foot. Problem is, this group, whoever they are, have let laziness be their downfall. Sam knows for a fact that Steve’s hearing is at least twice as good as the average person. If these thugs really wanted to surprise the two supersoldiers in that cabin then they probably should have walked the entire way from the town. Sam just hopes Steve had time to put the forewarning to use, and didn’t just assume the approaching engine was Sam returning.

Sam puts his foot down and floors it all the way up to the cabin’s side door. There's no point in caution now. If the men from the van are in the slightest bit competent, they'll have put eyes on the road in case their targets got out a call for back-up, in which case he will have already been seen. But no shots come, no shouts. 

The cabin is silent. 

There was no way Sam was leaving an unsecured weapon in the house near the Winter Soldier, so that fortunately means he has his gun with him in the car. Sam grabs the key-coded box out under the passenger seat and removes his Glock, sliding a clip home. Would Steve have been armed when the men arrived, beyond his shield? Sam doesn’t know. He breathes deep, and heads for the house.

The wood door is splintered around the lock. It’s been kicked in, and it opens with a gentle shove of his hand. Sam waits for five long seconds before he steps inside the silent house, gun raised.

The first thing he sees is a body, stretched across the hallway. It is clothed all in black, with tac vest and combat boots. He sees long, lank, black hair and a broken neck, feels a surge of panic. He crouches down and brushes the hair off the dead man’s face. Breathes out in relief – it’s not Barnes. He moves on, following the strafing bullet holes down the walls and sees the second corpse slumped in the doorway to the kitchen. This one is much less neat; there’s a knife hilt still sticking out of the man’s left eye, a SIG-Sauer tossed onto the floor, and a tacky pool of blood soaking into the hall carpet. Blood's cooling but not cold. Recent.

Stepping over the one-eyed corpse, Sam creeps to the kitchen and glances around the door, lightning fast. There are three more bodies, all in the same plain black tactical gear. No ID patches. One has been shot neatly through the head, and the second messily through the torso. The third has been beaten to death, seems to have had most of his sternum punched out. There are two M4 Carbines kicked into the corner behind the splintered dining table and a spray of blood up the wall above the stove top.

The house is still and so oppressively silent that cold dread is starting to pool low in Sam's belly. Five dead guys and one hell of a mess but no sign of Steve and Barnes, alive or dead. He has to check everywhere though, thoroughly. He has to be sure. Sam climbs over the one-eyed corpse back out into the hall, and crosses to the lounge. He nudges the door all the way open and darts inside, gun raised. There’s another three bodies in there too. One has been thrown straight through the table. The room’s been torn to shreds; splinters of glass and wood are everywhere, and all three windows have been shot out. Sam crosses cautiously to the nearest body to check the pulse, when suddenly something smashes into him. His gun is flying from his hand and he’s slammed face-first into the wall. Sam’s arm is being wrenched up behind his back while a weight against his spine forces his chest immovably against the splintered wood. He draws an instinctive breath to yell but then a knife blade flashes and he feels the press of it against his throat, and...

He doesn't die. Sam stays frozen still for ten long silent seconds before he realises he has to do something. Sam draws in a shallow, careful breath and says;

“Winter? That you? I-”

“Молчать!” The Winter Soldier’s voice in his ear is low and dangerous like the sound of an avalanche. The grip of metal fingers on Sam's wrist tightens from painful to agonising. Sam winces, but he can’t stop talking. The Winter Soldier will kill him at the slightest provocation, he knows, but he has to try and bring Barnes back. For Sam's own sake, if not for Steve’s.

“I’m Sam, remember?" He says, soft, breathless. "Not an enemy.”

The blade jabs in under his jaw, scraping the skin. The servos in the Soldier arm make a whirring, grinding sound, and he gives Sam a brief, impatient shake. 

"You called me from Steve’s phone,” Sam wheezes. "Med tech…" 

The Soldier seems to freeze for a second, before very quietly, he says:

“Steve?”

Sam tries not to swallow. “That’s right. You needed mission assistance, remember? A medical technician. Well, that’s me. I’m here.”

The Winter Soldier doesn’t move or make a sound but Sam can feel the bones grinding in his wrist. Then, as suddenly as before, the pressure on his back is gone, and he is spun around. His back is slammed against the wall, this time with his wrist pinned to his side. But before he can take anything in, that knife blade comes back to rest on the soft skin just below his right eye and Sam doesn't dare even breathe. The Winter Soldier is just a dark shadow in the corner of his vision, but Sam can tell he is being studied. The Soldier is trying to remember him.

“It’s okay,” Sam says, really, really trying not to move his face  _ at all _ . “They’re dead. You’re safe. I just need to see Steve now. Did they take him away? Is he alive?”

“Да,” the Soldier answers, but Sam’s not sure to which question. The Soldier considers for a moment more, and then the blade flashes and disappears from Sam’s eyeline. Then just as suddenly as he had attacked, the Soldier steps back and Sam is released. Sam staggers a little away from the wall, breathing hard and gripping his painful wrist. He looks at the Soldier for the first time, and fuck. The guy is  _ coated _ with blood. It’s all over his bare feet like he’s waded through it. It’s soaked into his sweatpants, sprayed like a fan across his t-shirt, and it drips from the blade of the kitchen knife and from the tips of his hair. There’s even a wide splash of it across his mouth, a grotesque parody of the mask he used to wear.

Hope that Steve is still alive begins to crumble, but Sam keeps his expression neutral. 

“The men that attacked," Sam asks, quiet, level. "Are there any here still alive?" 

He's seen eight bodies but he doesn't dare assume that was all of them. But if Barnes's hearing is anything like Steve's, he should know. The Soldier shakes his head, without hesitation.

"Okay, good. What about Steve? Is Steve still here? Can you take me to him?” The Soldier nods curtly, and then moves to snatch up Sam’s Glock from the floor. If Sam thought he was getting the weapon back though, he’s mistaken.

“Поднимите руки.”

Sam doesn’t understand the words, but the gesture the Winter Soldier makes with the gun barrel is unmistakable. Sam raises his hands but keeps them casually at shoulder height. He doesn’t want Barnes to pick up on how tense he is right now.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he reminds Barnes, but the Soldier just gestures with the gun again. He still has the kitchen knife too, gripped tightly in his metal hand.

“Идти.”

Sam turns and steps back out into the hall. The Winter Soldier is utterly silent behind him, and it makes his skin crawl. He glances back and the gun twitches to the left. He turns left, away from the kitchen and up the hallway. Another twitch right and they’re passing the bedroom and the bathroom. Back here, there’s a couple of unfurnished rooms, a small den, a back door leading out onto the decking and a linen closet. There’s a ninth corpse sprawled across the hallway. Sam swallows; no need to check if this one is dead. His throat has been ripped out.

“There,” Barnes says in English, with a movement of the gun. Sam pushes the very dead HYDRA agent out of the way, and then pulls open the door to the closet. And there is Steve, folded up and slumped against the wall. If anything he looks almost deader than some of the corpses behind them. His face is pale as old milk and blood has soaked into his hair and poured down the side of his face. Sam forgets all about the 260lbs of concentrated death standing behind him and drops his hands, scrambling to Steve’s side. He’s still breathing, thank God, and his pulse is regular, if a little weak, under Sam’s fingertips.

He quickly finds the site of all the blood; there’s a deep gash, about three inches long, above Steve’s ear and Sam can smell burnt hair. Someone just came damn close to putting a bullet in Captain America’s skull. It must be almost 45 minutes since the attack, based off the time of Barnes’ phone call, but the wound is still bleeding. Sam snatches a pillow case off the shelf above their heads and presses it to Steve’s head. Then he looks up at the Winter Soldier. Barnes is standing at rest a couple of metres away in the hall, arms at his sides. He’s staring at Steve.

“I gotta get the first aid kit,” Sam tells him. “I need you to come here and put pressure on this ‘till I get back.”

He doesn’t even have time to get up. The Soldier is already shaking his head and backing away. The plates in his arm click together, almost nervously. Sam doesn’t know whatever the fuck the issue is now, but he doesn’t have time for it.

“Fine, then you go get it. It’s in the trunk of the car outside. Green box. White cross. Go.”

The Soldier nods and follows the order immediately as if he’s completely forgotten he was holding Sam hostage at gunpoint a second ago. While he’s gone, Sam quickly checks Steve for other injuries. He has some small cuts to his knuckles, so it’s clear that they weren’t taken completely by surprise, but nothing more serious than the head wound. What the hell happened here?

“How did they find this place?” Sam asks the moment the Winter Soldier returns with the box, but the Soldier doesn't give an answer. Maybe he doesn't know. “Are there more coming?” Sam tries instead, trying to work out how wide their window of safety is.

“Yes,” says the Soldier

“Shit. Come on, help me get him into the bedroom.”

Moving Steve is trickier than it should be because Sam is fairly sure his own wrist is fractured, and the Soldier’s metal arm is still playing up and he seems reluctant to put down any of his weapons. But they finally manage to drag Steve out of the cupboard and get him lying flat on the bed without any further injury.

Sam quickly dresses Steve’s wound as fast as he can, but Steve is still unconscious and blood is soaking through the first dressing already. The Soldier, meanwhile, has disappeared. Sam can hear him moving around elsewhere in the building but he’s too busy with Steve to worry about what Barnes might be up to. It's ten minutes later before Sam’s satisfied that he’s done all he can for Steve. He’s packing up the first aid box when Barnes comes back in.

“Другие агенты,” he says. 

"English, man," Sam says, tossing the kit into his duffel. "I don't understand Russian."

Barnes pauses and forces out the words. It's not good. “More. Are coming.”

Sam doesn’t waste time asking him how he knows, or how much time they have. They have to run, right now.

“Help me,” he says, and between them they pull Steve up mostly onto his feet, and then drag him out to the hall. Sam glances around.

The bodies are missing. 

The Soldier must have dragged them off somewhere while Sam was seeing to Steve, but it’s just one more thing that Sam doesn’t want to ask about. Instead he focuses on getting Steve out of the house and into the car. They lay him along the back seat as flat as possible. Sam dashes back into the house and grabs what he can of their stuff, throwing things into the duffel. He has no idea when it’ll be safe enough for them to come back again. He grabs Barnes’ Winter Soldier boots and armoured jacket from by the door, and finds Steve’s shield under one of the beds.

Barnes is hovering by the car when he returns. Sam throws the stuff into the trunk and climbs into the driver’s seat. Barnes is still waiting outside the car.

“Dude, get in. You said yourself more guys were on their way.”

Barnes reaches for the rear door handle as if moving on instinct, but Sam leans over and opens the front passenger door for him instead.

“You might not have noticed but the back seat is already fully occupied with supersoldier. Just ride shotgun, will you? Time's a-wasting.”

Barnes gets into the passenger seat without a word. He leans back, closing his eyes, and rests the Glock on his knees. Sam glances back at Steve, throws the shifter and speeds out of the yard. They bump their way down the uneven gravel track without meeting another car, and Sam pauses at the intersection with the main road, glancing left, ready to make the turn right towards the town.

Barnes suddenly leans forward. “No.”

Sam slams on the brakes. “What? ‘No’ what?”

Barnes gestures to the left.“Нет городов.” 

Sam has no idea what his problem is, but it's clear that he isn't happy with the direction.

“I have to get Steve to the hospital,” Sam explains. “Town's that way.”

“No.” Barnes snaps, and Sam hears the Winter Soldier in his voice. A sudden movement and the Glock is up beside Sam’s right ear. He doesn’t dare turn his head, but a flick of Sam's eyes establishes that the safety is not engaged. “No hospital.”

Sam grits his teeth, but there's no point in arguing. He just hopes Steve's head is as hard as it seems. 

“Fine.”

He turns the car left, and they head out onto the dark highway.

They have gone nearly two miles north before the house behind them explodes.

* * *


	6. Sam

Overwhelmed by instincts he doesn’t know he still has, Sam swerves at the sound of the explosion and slams on the brakes. He spills out of the car, staring back up the road in horror. Behind them in the dusk, he can see the silhouette of the hillside and a patch of bright orange flame. There’s a plume of smoke rising like a ghost against the dark blue sky.

“What the fuck?” he gasps, because just as he knows it was the house that just went up, he also knows that HYDRA was not responsible for it. They haven’t seen any other vehicles on the road, and no second team could have gotten there that fast. So unless HYDRA somehow launched another domestic missile strike without SHIELD or Pierce, there is only one person who could have blown up that house.

“Barnes, what the actual fuck?” Sam yells, even though he knows it’s bad and he’s losing his calm but this is all getting to be a bit too fucking much. He’s crashing from the adrenaline, scared, exhausted, but it’s more than that. He‘s put his entire life on hold to help a friend-of-a-friend who just came close to cutting his throat and might still kill him at any moment, and Captain America just got  _ shot in the head _ , and now he’s fleeing the crime scene of a multiple homicide where the same friend-of-a-friend just blew up another friend’s home and his wrist  _ really fucking hurts. _

He knows he’s been unfair as soon as he’s done shouting, but it’s too late. The damage is done. Barnes goes all stiff, and for a second Sam thinks he’s going to attack. But instead Barnes just hunches his shoulders in, curling down over his knees. His hands, flesh and metal, interlock at the back of his neck, and it’s almost like if he was out of the car, he'd be kneeling on the floor at Sam’s feet like a beaten dog.

“Winter – don’t do that,” Sam says but it’s no good. The Soldier is silent and Sam can just make out his unfocused staring through the curtain of his hair, can hear his soft, uneven breathing. “Please,” Sam asks again, but Barnes has dissociated, hard, and so far they haven’t found anything that helps bring him back to himself until he’s ready.

Sam just stands in the middle of the road next to the idling car, watching the distant flames glow a dull orange against the sky and comes to a realisation. He doesn’t know what to do. Both Steve and Barnes should be in the hospital. Sam could always turn round and head straight there now Barnes is too out of it to object. Steve could get a much needed MRI and Barnes...Barnes would be instantly seized by SWAT or the army or the CIA and dragged off to some secret supermax dungeon under GTMO, probably never to be seen again.  _ Fuck.  _

Sam can’t do it. Besides, it's probably too late now. It’s not so remote up here that a house blowing up won't result in the whole county crawling with cops inside of two hours. And there’s the other HYDRA agents Barnes was afraid of - they can’t be far behind.

Sam turns back to the car and spends a few valuable minutes reassuring himself that Steve isn’t so badly hurt that they need to risk the hospital regardless of the danger. Fortunately for Sam’s peace of mind Steve opens his eyes a crack when Sam gives him a firm shake and even mutters something uncomplimentary before going back to sleep. Motor and verbal response, a GCS of 11 or 12, normal pupil reaction...It could be a lot worse. They obviously gave out hard heads back in the day. And as for Barnes...well. There’s so much blood on him Sam has no idea if any of it belongs to the man himself. But he had been walking around fine back at the cabin after all, so all Sam can do for now is hope he’s not hurt so bad it can’t wait. They have to get moving.

A little more reassured that no-one is going to die on his watch, Sam sets off again. He doesn’t know where they're going except away from the burning remains of the cabin, so he just keeps driving, taking them west. 

After about forty minutes, Steve wakes up again. He’s still sleepy and pretty out of it, but Sam is again reassured that the prolonged unconsciousness is not as bad as he first feared. It seems possible that the supersoldier serum is acting to concentrate the healing somehow, taking recovery time for a severe concussion from a month down into a few hours. If that is the case, a stretch of unconsciousness this long is probably less worrying for Steve than it might be for a normal, unenhanced person. Still, having Steve even somewhat alert improves Sam’s stress levels considerably. Not that Steve is awake for long; he coughs, rubs his head, groans, and then starts asking questions.  _ Is Bucky all right, what happened at the cabin, where are they? _ Once Sam has reassured him on all counts and asked a few questions of his own, Steve falls asleep again.

Barnes himself doesn’t react to the sound of Steve's voice, and remains silent and unmoving, staring unblinking down at his knees.

They stop for the first time after about three hours when Sam’s eyes close involuntarily and he almost drives them into a tree. He’s exhausted and the adrenaline has long since fizzled out. He pulls off at a gas station and kills the engine, opening the door to let in the cold night air and a rich scent of pine. He rubs his probably fractured wrist and breathes in the night. He’s feeling guilty about yelling at Barnes; the guy is sick and, God above, Sam knows it’s not his fault. If anyone is not to blame for this clusterfuck, it’s Barnes. He’s a victim in all this. A murderous, terrifying, weaponized, six foot, 260-pound cyborg victim.

Sam gets out of the car, and checks first on Steve - he’s out of it - and then crosses round to the passenger side to look in on Barnes. The Soldier has remained in his curled-up position since they left the house, and the levels of Sam’s ever-present worry are starting to creep back up again. Sam opens the door and crouches down in the dirt.

“Winter?”

As he expected there’s no reply. Sam reaches out and gives the right elbow a cautious shake, ready to leap back if the Winter Soldier wakes up fighting or with the gun in his hand. Barnes does stir, but he moves slowly, unhooking his stiff fingers and lowering his arms to his knees. He doesn’t raise his head, but Sam can see his expression now and, under the smears of dried blood, he’s somehow managing to look both blank and miserable at the same time.

Sam feels like a piece of shit. In the last few days, Barnes has been kind of astonishing. Sam can absolutely believe that the Winter Soldier’s brainwashing was capable of putting him into stand-down if he became too injured to complete a mission. After all, HYDRA had invested a lot of time and effort into their Asset. They wouldn’t want him killed or permanently injured for no good reason. And at first, after Barnes gave up on attacking Steve that did seem to be what was happening.

But.

The men that attacked the house had to have been from HYDRA, and they had to have been coming for Barnes. There were at least nine guys in the house, maybe ten; not enough to take on Captain America and the Winter Soldier together. They must not have expected Barnes to fight back. They had been sent to ambush Steve and Sam, and reclaim HYDRA property, not go up against two supersoldiers. But despite all the brainwashing and torture and amnesia, Barnes had not gone with them. They thought he would be theirs instantly, meek and compliant, but whatever the fuck had happened in the house, the last thing Barnes had been was compliant. Not to Hydra, at any rate. He’d protected Steve, hid him when he was injured, called for backup. And then he had, brutally and unflinchingly, slaughtered every single one of his former allies.

It seems that Barnes made a choice for the first time in 70 years. He chose Steve.

“Winter,” Sam calls him again. “Come on, look at me.”

Barnes’s eyes move slowly and he doesn’t seem to be able to look up any higher than Sam’s knees. But he is listening.

“Listen. I’m really sorry I yelled at you,” Sam says. “That was bad and I shouldn’t have done it. You didn’t do anything wrong. You saved Steve, you called me when you needed help, and you protected us. I know the explosion was just you trying to hide our tracks; I get that. I just shouted because I was stressed and worried about Steve. That’s not an excuse I know, and I’m sorry. You did good, okay? I want you to tell me you understand.”

It comes across a little patronising despite Sam’s best efforts, but Christ, he has no idea what the guy is able to comprehend right now anyway. Barnes is silent. He seems to be processing all that for a few moments before finally he nods. His head comes up a little.

“That’s good,” Sam encourages, starting to wonder if Barnes has received anything like praise in a really long time. “Now, can you tell me if you're hurt anywherel? Were you injured in the fighting?”

Barnes shakes his head. Sam hopes he knows what he's talking about.

“Okay, great. I’m going to get some gas, okay? I want you to stay here, and look after Steve. ”

Barnes doesn’t look up, but to Sam’s surprise, he picks up Sam’s Glock from where it has been resting on his thighs. He slides it onto the dash and then moves his hand away. Sam looks at it.

“Are you...giving that back to me?” he asks. Barnes nods, so Sam slowly takes the gun, and shoves it into his jacket. He’s confused, but he doesn’t ask any more questions. Maybe Barnes thinks Sam is the most capable of looking after them right now. Or maybe he’s assuming Sam is just going to hold up the gas station instead of paying. The guy was a supervillain after all, so really, who can say.

Sam fills up the tank, and then heads into the small store. It’s late, maybe 2100, but the sign says the place is open 24/7. He grabs a handful of granola bars and some bottles of water. The clerk glowers, like Sam is wasting his time, but he rings him up.

“Not seen you before.”

Sam nods. “Just passing through. Taking the scenic route, but I think I got us lost. Can you tell me if there’s a motel around here?”

The guy scowls and launches into a rant about the crappiness of the town, the lack of jobs and the obvious mental problems anyone visiting such a backwater must clearly be suffering.

Eventually Sam manages to get out of him that there’s a motel (‘a flea-ridden shithole’) about twenty miles south of where they are. It’s not ideal, but they just need somewhere to hole up while they decide what to do.

He heads back over to the car and the first thing he notices is that the passenger seat is empty. His breath catches, and then he sees that the rear door of the car is open too. He slows his pace, and approaches cautiously. Barnes is crouching low to the tarmac by the rear door, looking down at Steve curled up on the back seat. The Soldier’s flesh hand is pressing gently on the dressing on Steve’s head. He’s taking care of Steve, just like Sam told him to.

Sam feels a weird sensation in his chest. He’s  _ proud.  _ Proud that this barely functioning, traumatised fucking mess of a serial murderer, who - FYI - just tore a man's throat _ out with his teeth, _ can even comprehend gentleness anymore.

He approaches slowly, making sure to scuff his feet so the Soldier isn’t taken by surprise. Even so, Barnes snatches his hand away from Steve like he’s been electrocuted. Without a word or a glance to Sam, Barnes scuttles silently back to the passenger seat and gets in, leaving the door that Sam opened for him untouched. Sam sighs, but seeing Barnes walking on the tarmac has just reminded him that the guy is still barefoot and wearing nothing but a blood-soaked t-shirt and sweatpants. Apart from the obvious downsides to sporting a murder-hobo-chic look accessorised in fresh blood spatter, they’re out in the countryside in the middle of the night in freaking November. The guy needs some more layers. 

Sam opens the trunk of the car, and then gets his next unpleasant surprise of the night. There is a black trash bag in the trunk that wasn’t there before. Poking out of the top Sam can just see the barrels of what look like two M4 Carbines. He pokes Barnes's stash of stolen guns and a goddamn  _ grenade _ rolls out. It has the pin intact, but still. This is getting ridiculous. 

The other supplies Sam picked up earlier, before everything went to shit, are still in the trunk, so Sam shoves aside the stolen weaponry and grabs some of the clothes he bought, the first aid box and one of the jars of applesauce. He checks the cut on Steve’s head, but it stopped bleeding some time ago and looks like it is starting to close. Good. Then he goes back to Barnes and inspects the Soldier’s bare feet as best he can without touching them. They are bloody and cut-up, but there doesn’t seem to be any embedded glass or debris that he can see by the light on his phone. Sam makes the Soldier stick his feet out of the car and sluices them off with water, just in case. Then he hands over a pair of socks and the running shoes which Barnes dutifully puts on, and then the hoodie.

Barnes lifts the hoodie to pull it on and then something really weird happens. As he raises his robotic arm, the thing twitches, sudden and violent. For a split second Sam thinks the Soldier is going to strike out at him, but then Barnes grabs the metal wrist in his other hand and drags the prosthetic in close to his chest. He hunches forward around it, breathing hard, trembling. Like he’s in pain.

“You okay?” Sam asks, but gets only silence back. After half a minute or so, whatever it is finally passes, and Barnes relaxes, letting the arm fall to his side. But before Sam can ask more, he notices a sudden strange buzzing sound. He wonders for a moment if it is yet another further malfunction with the arm, until he realises he’s been hearing that sound for a while, just too quietly to notice until the metal touched it and amplified the vibration.

“Hey, what is that? Is that a phone?”

Barnes reaches across with his flesh hand and into his left pocket. He pulls out a white cell phone and obediently drops it into Sam’s waiting hand. The handset stops vibrating, and the cracked screen flashes up with the message ‘ _ 21 missed calls’ _ . It’s Steve’s phone. Barnes must have had it since he called Sam earlier. Sam scrolls through the missed calls, eight from himself from earlier, two from an unknown number and ten from Tony Stark.

Sam stands up and pushes the hoodie back to Barnes. “All right. One thing at a time. Let’s finish getting you dressed. Put that on,” he instructs, and waits while the other man does it. The arm almost doesn’t fit, and he makes a mental note to get a larger size next time. But at least the thing doesn't seem to malfunction this time and Barns manages dressing on his own. Sam puts the jar of applesauce and a plastic spoon on the dash. “I just have to make a phone call, okay? I’ll be standing just over there. In the meantime, I want you to try and eat that, but it’s okay to stop if it makes you feel sick. But I want you to try.”

Sam leaves Barnes staring at the jar, and crosses over towards the trees at the edge of the parking lot. He’s probably not out of Barnes’ hearing range, but it makes him feel a little better anyway. He dry swallows a bunch of Tylenol, cracks the ice pack that he pinched from Barnes’ stash and wraps it around his swollen wrist. Then, cradling the limb to his chest, he takes a deep breath, and hits ‘redial’.

The phone rings twice. Then a voice Sam had heard a hundred times on the TV says:

_ “You know what? Too late, buddy. You just go ahead and die in a fire and don’t bother to call anyone. See if I care.” _

“Mr Stark?” Sam asks after a pause. He knows it is, but he’s still cautious. The man’s tone changes instantly.

_ “Um, yeah, and exactly who the fuck are you? ‘Cause this is Steve Rogers phone and if you’ve done something to him, I swear to God that I will-“ _

“No, it's okay, I’m a friend of Steve’s,” Sam says, having images of Tony Stark calling down some kind of drone strike on them all because Sam has Steve’s phone and sounded ‘a bit suspicious’. “My name is Sam, Sam Wilson.”

_ “Well, excuse me if I don’t believe you, Mr I’m-apparently-a-friend-of-Steve’s-but-his-other- _

_ friends-have-literally-never-heard-of-me-before Wilson,” _ Stark snaps. _ “Now you listen to me very carefully; Hill’s already sent a SHIELD team, former SHIELD whatever, to the house to manage the scene and I am in the middle of testing the Mark 43 prototype, which I totally Did Not Build by the way, so if I have to come out there myself and personally kick your ass I’m gonna be in so much-” _

_“Sir.”_ A posh-sounding guy with a British accent is suddenly on the line, interrupting Stark’s tirade. _“Sir, former Staff Sergeant Sam Wilson is indeed an associate of Captain Rogers. He assisted the Captain and Black Widow at the Battle of DC and the Battle of the Triskelion_ _against the HYDRA uprising. He works at the Veterans’ Association in Washington, and he lives at 1058-”_

_ “Some SHIELD guy?” _ Stark says.  _ “JARVIS, I think I’d remember-“ _

_ “He is not a member of SHIELD, Sir. He was the pilot flying the EXO-7 Falcon winged exoskeleton. I have verified his voice pattern.” _

“Listen, why don’t I just hang up and you guys can talk amongst yourselves?” Sam says, both irritated and alarmed at how much this Jarvis guy seems to know about him. They have his freaking address?

_ “Sure thing, Feathers, except the only way you’re getting out of this conversation is if you put Steve Rogers on the line, and then flap your ass straight over to NYC so I can take a look at those wings,”  _ Stark says.  _ “That rig looked heavier than a pig dipped in mud, and you can’t bank for shit, I saw the footage. Surprised that gear didn’t dump your ass straight into the Potomac the moment you took off. You gotta let me-” _

Sam takes the opportunity of Stark monologuing to inhale a granola bar. The sub he ate in the park seems like a really long time ago and he really needs a burger and a coffee, or maybe ten, before he can deal with this crap. As soon as there’s a pause in Stark’s flow of words, he interrupts.

“Man, there's nothing I'd like better than to have Tony Stark work on my wings, particularly as the rig is currently in, like, eight pieces. But I'm kinda in the middle of something here, so I'm just returning your call to let you know Steve’s okay.”

_ “Then what, has the old man finally gone so senile he’s forgotten how to answer the damn phone?”  _ Stark has switched from engineer back to mother hen in a heartbeat.  _ “JARVIS picked up reports of the explosion; something blows up around here these days and I just know Steve Rogers will be found hip-deep in that crap, then he’s not answering his calls and they find the place on fire and full of corpses... Seriously, what the hell? Tell me this wasn’t the Winter-fucking-Soldier.” _

“It wasn’t,” Sam assures him, then reconsiders. “Okay, I guess actually it was, but a team attacked the house, I’m pretty sure they were HYDRA. Steve was hurt. Barnes took them all out. He burnt down the house to destroy the evidence.”

_ “Steve’s hurt?” _ Stark snaps, and if Sam was concerned before by Stark's apparently devil-may-care attitude towards Steve, the way Stark says those two words proves him wrong _. “Tell me. Now.” _

“He’s got a concussion,” Sam explains, deciding to sensor the bit where Steve got shot in the damn head. “He’s asleep right now. We’re on the road, I’m heading for a motel so they can sleep if off. I’ll have him call you in the morning.”

_ “Wait, ‘they’? New guy, you better not be telling me you still have the Winter Psycho with you.” _

Sam winces, hoping Barnes’ hearing is not as good as he thinks it is.

“Yeah, Barnes is here,” Sam says. “He’s in the car eating applesauce.”

_ “Fuck that!”  _ Stark snaps. “ _ I told Steve he was out of his goddamn mind not turning him in the moment he showed up on your doorstep. Sick or not, he’s fucking Hydra, and...you know what, never mind. Clearly everyone but me has suspended all rational thought. I don’t even know why I let Steve talk me out of this the first time around. JARVIS, get that SHIELD team off stand-down, deploy immediately. They’ll be with you in thirty minutes, Tinkerbell.” _

“I am asking you not to do that, Stark,” says Sam, and seriously, this guy is an  _ asshole. _ “Trust me, a truck full of former SHIELD agents is gonna be the last thing you want Steve to see when he wakes up. And Barnes is doing okay right now but if he thinks he’s under attack I don’t know what could happen. You have to let Steve handle this. We’re gonna get Barnes somewhere safe and then we’ll figure out what to do from there.”

_ “Somewhere safe?”  _ Stark splutters. _ “You don’t even have a plan. This guy killed Nick Fury, came damn close to killing Steve and Natasha. You think I’m just gonna let you-” _

“I’m not asking for your permission, Stark,” Sam says, exhaustion making his tone more biting than usual. “I’m just doing you the courtesy of keeping you up to date. Steve is safe, the Winter Soldier is not currently a danger to us, and we definitely do not need goddamn SHIELD involved. I’m going to turn this phone off in case anyone is tracking it, but I’ll have Steve call you back when he’s awake.”

There is a good ten second pause, and then Stark snaps.

_ “Fine. But if you both wake up in the morning to find Red Son has carved the State Anthem of the Soviet Union into your foreheads with a hunting knife, don’t come crying to me.” _

The line goes dead.

The passenger seat is empty again when Sam gets back to the car, only this time Barnes isn’t in the back with Steve. Sam looks around and even under the car, but there’s no sign of him anywhere. The guy has vanished.

“Winter? Where’re you at, buddy?” He calls into the dark, trying to sound curious and not at all pissed off. If Barnes gets spooked again, he might disappear for good.

There’s no reply. Sam is trying to work out if he has enough energy left to even be alarmed, when he turns around to find Barnes standing silently about five foot from him like a fucking ninja. He must have just stepped out of the trees.

“Jesus!” Sam starts, can’t help himself. “Give a guy some warning next time you’re creeping about, I coulda shot you.”

Barnes just stares at him for a moment, and then to Sam’s utter astonishment, speaks.

“Had to take a leak,” he says, and his mouth twists up at the side like he’s actually amused. Then the almost-smile vanishes and the Soldier turns away and gets back into the passenger seat.

Dumfounded, Sam follows him back to the car, and they set off.

Barnes is silent as they drive in the direction the gas station attendant had reluctantly pointed out to them. When Sam glances at him, the brief flash of awareness he’d just shown seems to have disappeared as quickly as it came; Barnes is just staring at the dashboard, unseeing and unblinking. Sam's own exhausted thoughts swirl around the mess of contradictions that is the Winter Soldier. In the last two days, Bucky Barnes has puked his guts up, sobbed his heart out, pissed himself, been catatonic and generally incapable of washing, feeding, or caring for himself in any significant way at all. He hasn’t even been able to manage any human interaction that wasn’t about his  _ mission _ . But now in the last few hours he’s protected Steve, hidden ther tracks, armed Sam, and issued one pretty spectacular  _ fuck you  _ to the guys who’ve been controlling his every thought for half a century. In the last ten minutes alone he smiled, talked in English, took himself off to piss without prior instruction, and, from the empty applesauce jar in the footwell, he’s even fed himself. If it wasn’t for the fact that all that came with the price tag that Barnes had also just burned down a house and murdered nine men, several of them quite brutally, Sam might almost call it progress.

They arrive at the motel and its every bit as much of a shithole as the gas station attendant complained it was. Sam parks at the far end of the lot and leaves Barnes with strict orders not to move until he gets back. Last thing they need is someone seeing a blood-soaked creep wandering around the motel and calling the cops. The teenager at the desk is reading a copy of the National Geographic with a manatee on the front cover, and he eyes Sam with yet more suspicion. Sam ad libs something about the awesome bachelor party he’s just driven the guys back from and how this one guy is so wasted he can’t even walk, so can they have a room at the end of the row cause their hangovers are gonna be  _ deadly _ tomorrow? The teen looks vaguely jealous but checks Sam in and tosses him a key to Room 21; two queens and a fold-out bed.

When he gets back to the car, Barnes is, for once, exactly where Sam had left him, staring blankly head. He doesn’t respond to Sam’s voice. Sam carefully unclips the guy’s seat belt for him, being careful not to touch him, and then goes round to wake Steve. Steve surfaces a little when Sam shakes him, mumbling something that sounds like _ “...movement in the treeline, Monty, 10 o'clock” _ . Sam has to physically haul him from the car but fortunately Steve gets his feet under him with minimal need for Sam to use his fucked-up wrist and the two of them successfully make it into the motel room. Steve slumps onto the nearest bed, holding his head, and just gives a vague thumbs up when Sam asks if he's okay.

Sam leaves him for the moment and goes back to the car to fetch Barnes as he clearly isn’t going to follow them in on his own. The guy is huddled into the hoodie but, from what little of his face is showing, Sam can see he’s as spaced out again, looking almost as exhausted as Steve. They all need sleep. It takes a few firm calls of  _ “Winter?”  _ and an order to move before Barnes finally stirs himself and Sam leads him back into the motel room. Under the harsh lights, the dried-up smears of blood all over his face and his teeth look even worse, so Sam prods Barnes straight into the bathroom with orders to wash. Sam turns the shower on for him and waits around long enough to check he can manage to undress himself and then leaves the guy to it.

Back in the bedroom, Steve is slumped over his knees, looking like he's about to hurl.

“Hey man, you okay?”

Steve groans. “Yeah. Where's Bucky? Is he okay?”

“He's in the shower. Maybe seems a little better than before, actually. Dude, I cannot believe you let some crappy knock-off Nazi shoot you in the head. You've been out of it for hours.”

Steve groans again. “I feel terrible. What year is it?”

It's meant to be a joke but, given the situation, it just comes across as kind of sad.

“Ha ha,” Sam humours him. “You tell me, old man. Come on, you must have had your bell rung enough times to know the drill by now.”

Steve humourlessly supplies the answers to Sam's questions; what day it is, the President's name, a bunch of key dates from history, as well as reciting a load of army regulations. Sam expands the usual exam by prompting Steve to tell him as much as he can remember about the attack on the cabin, but it's not much. Steve and Bucky had both heard the engine of a vehicle coming up the drive at around the same time but Bucky had recognised the danger first. Steve had been halfway down the hall to grab his shield when the door had been kicked in. He remembers turning over a table and dragging Barnes down behind it. Dodging bullet fire, punching someone, maybe several someones, and then, nothing at all. He barely finished his retelling before he's asleep again. Sam’s baseline concern cranks up another notch.

Sam makes a few more trips to the car to bring in the basics of their stuff: clothes and food, the Glock and Steve’s shield. Looks like the tranq gun and Nat’s super-soldier cuffs were both victims of the fire, and Sam can only fervently pray that this strange truce Steve has going on with Barnes will hold out. He dithers for a moment but decides that the bag of weapons the Soldier stripped from the HYDRA agents is safest left locked up in the trunk. He keeps his Glock.

Once he’s back in the room, Sam balances Steve's shield on the side table where Steve will see it when he wakes up, and then hides the Glock where he can get to it quickly if he needs to. Then he grabs a set of the new clothes for Barnes, along with a few toiletries and knocks on the bathroom door. It's been a while, maybe the guy has drowned.

“Winter? It's Sam. Can I come in? Got some clothes for you.”

There's a long, long silence. The water is still going. Sam waits, and finally a quiet voice inside says,  _ “Ja. Kommen Sie herein.” _

Sam frowns; Barnes has muddled his English and Russian a lot so far, but this is the first German they’ve heard. A sign of just how tired Barnes is? But at least he's managed to shower without incident. Sam goes into the bathroom and finds that of course that positive thought had been too soon. Barnes is crouching on the floor of the shower cubicle, naked and shivering under the beat of the spray because he either couldn’t or wouldn’t turn the heat up and the water is goddamn freezing. It takes maybe forty minutes and most of his sanity but eventually Sam manages to get Barnes blood-free, dry and warm, without another meltdown. Steve sleeps through it all. 

Sam deposits Barnes, now in clean sweats, t-shirt and socks on the other bed, curled up against the headboard and blinking unevenly. Sam makes him eat another jar of applesauce, while he himself consumes a joyless meal of cold beans straight out of the can, before ordering the Soldier to sleep. Barnes seems to struggle with himself for a moment, and Sam sees his eyes flick between the door, the window, Steve and then to Sam.

_ “Дозор?” _He asks. “Watch...?”

Sam nods. “I'm on watch, yes. No-one is going to get in. You can sleep.”

The effect is instantaneous. Barnes sighs, slumps a little, and is out faster than a winter nightfall. Sam is left alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for all your comments! It's really heartening to hear from you guys.   
> Stay safe x


	7. Asset

The first man they want him to kill kneels in the mud in a grey courtyard. It's an American soldier, a POW like him. He refuses, of course, and they beat him, until he laughs and spits out his defiance at them through bloody teeth. They kill the POW in front of him. Time passes, and there is torment and pain and deep cramping hunger and an endless noise that won’t stop, day and night and day and... Then the courtyard again and a second man. A German. Kill him, they say. He is a Nazi, a bad man. You have killed them before. He refuses, of course, and they beat him until he spits blood. No laughing this time. Time passes; this is the Chair and electricity channelling right into his brain. Kill this man, they say in the courtyard, and it will all stop. He is a criminal, a murderer. You must kill him. It's why you were made. Kill him and the pain will end. He refuses, and there is pain and the Chair, and he forgets. Time and time and time. The courtyard, and a man. This one is lying on the ground, screaming in agony. There is blood everywhere, slashes from a blade across his face and his eyes and his legs and stabbed through the ribs into his lungs, and so much screaming, frothing spit and blood, and the man is going to die, slowly, drowning on his own fluids. You did this, they tell him over the sound of those screams, but he cannot remember. Look down. See the blood on your clothes? The knife in your hand? James Barnes did this evil thing, but you can make it right. Kill this man quickly, end his suffering. End the screams. You can help him. It's the only way to help him. He takes the gun he is offered and he shoots the man through the head. At last the screams of agony fall silent. It helps. It is better. Next time there is a Russian. Kill him, they say, he is a bad man, he abuses children. Tortures little children, and he'll do it again unless you stop him. You can help them if you kill him. He takes the gun and shoots the man through the head. Next they bring another murderer, an American. He takes the gun and shoots. There's a Frenchman, and a knife. He stabs. A woman and a box of matches; a man and a thin wire; faceless bodies and nothing but his bare hands. He kills them. He kills them all. 

Then they bring out a child and they bring out a gun.

James Barnes' body screams. The Asset can feel the sound tearing at its throat and forcing itself out of its wretched lungs. The body is restrained, some heavy covering is trapping its arms and legs and the Soldier kicks wildly. The screaming won't stop and it can't release its hands to shut the noise up, and its programming is looping over and over, trapped in the same fractured visuals. Breathing is compromised. Motor-control all but non-existent and vision appears to be non-functional. Hearing is sporadic; the Soldier picks up a distorted echo of sound, like a voice saying over and over _“Bucky, it's okay, you're safe now, Buck please, it’s okay.”_

Its arms are suddenly free and the Soldier clamps its hands, real metal and fake flesh, tight over its mouth. The sound of the screams are trapped behind that impenetrable barrier, although its body is still convulsing, eyes pouring water, lungs burn and heart races. 

Through icy fog filling its mind, the Soldier feels a foreign touch on the back of its flesh hand; it flinches violently, but suddenly there's calm. A point of order in the chaos, a call to focus. A motion, a symbol. The Asset stills, drawing all its attention to that touch. A pattern marked out on skin, a circle round and round and round. More than words ever could, it says: _it's okay. You're safe now._ It says _you are not alone._ The touch disappears, but the Soldier is back in control of its rebel flesh and bone. It keeps its hands clamped tight to hold in the screams, and it breathes out slowly through the nose.

Time passes and sounds filter in through the static. They form words.

“...Buck...”

“...he okay?”

“...nightmare, I think. The blankets...”

“Does that mean he's remembering...?”

“...have no idea. I thought his memory coming back would be a good thing, but...”

Now closer. “Hey, Winter? Are you all right?”

There is no answer. The Soldier hears the rustle of cloth as someone moves in its vicinity. It opens its eyes and drops its hands from its mouth, readying itself for attack or punishment, but neither is forthcoming. The Handlers back slowly away, and then go to the other side of the room, talking quietly. No-one approaches and no-one touches it again. The Asset has been dismissed. Relieved, it stays still, and tries to breathe though the deep grinding pain beneath its arm, deep in its side. Maintenance is required, but there are no technicians left. 

The Soldier pulls the neckline of the garment it is wearing up over its mouth, lies on its side to support the arm, and closes its eyes. The Asset was under previous orders to sleep but the Handlers don’t reinforce the order. They just keep talking, as if it's not there. This, at least, is familiar.

“Man, I am done in,” a Handler says to the other. “I wasn't gonna wake you, but as he already did that for me....I just need a few hours' shut-eye but someone should be on watch, just in case.”

“God, Sam, I'm sorry. Yes, of course. I'm okay. Head's killing me so doubt I'll get to sleep again anyway.”

“Thanks, man. You sure? Here. Tylenol. And I mean just a few hours, and then wake me.”

There's a rattling sound, like small ammunition, as something is thrown, and then the other bed creaks, followed by the scrape of the chair being moved to the window. Then there is silence for a moment. Sam Wilson asks, very quietly:

“He's gone pretty quiet. What was it that you did to snap him out of it?”

“It's just this thing we used to do. I didn't know if it'd work. Back in the War, when Bucky and his unit were captured... A lot of guys didn't make it. Those that did, well, I didn't know them from before so I can't say. But Bucky was never really the same. I don't know what Zola did to him in that lab; I don't think Bucky really remembered. Least, he never talked about it, not to me, not to anyone. The seizures went off within a few weeks. But he would still have these moments sometimes when he'd just...get stuck. Sometimes just staring at nothing, or nightmares he couldn't wake up from. Flashbacks, I guess you'd say now. The other guys and I, we developed this thing, I don’t remember how we came up with it...someone would draw out a circle on his hand. It sounds weird, I know, but it seemed to bring him out of it. I didn’t think he would still remember.”

“Hmm. Grounding techniques can be pretty powerful. I guess it worked 'cause it’s not a motion he would be likely to associate with anything else. Something individual to him, but without being too personal. That's pretty impressive.”

“We did what we could. It wasn't much.”

“Still, it's useful to know something that he responds to.”

The Soldier shuts down sometime after and when it reboots later, there is silence but for the sound of breathing. Sam Wilson is sprawled out, deep in sleep on his face on the other bed. In a chair in the far corner, Captain Rogers is slumped back, head tilted and mouth open. He too is asleep. He should be on watch. 

The Soldier pulls its arm in close and slips silently from the bed. It knows that there is a gun in the room, and it knows all the likely places a handler like Sam Wilson would hide one. It's the work of a moment to slide the weapon out from under the pillow where Sam Wilson's head is resting; he never stirs. The magazine is on the bedside cabinet. The Soldier slides it home. He crosses back to Captain Rogers and observes him carefully. He is asleep when he should be on watch. A simple bullet in the brain is all it would take. Not much functionality needed for that at all - the pain in its side, intermittent arm malfunction, compromised breathing - none of these will impede it. Aim just a few millimetres to the left of where the HYDRA agent's shot had grazed him, and the Soldier's mission would be successful. Or, if the gun is too loud, the Asset's hand could crush Captain America's throat before he even woke. The Asset could drown him in the motel bath, stab his eyes out with shards of glass, tie him to the chair and burn down the building. Captain Rogers is asleep when he should be on watch.

_Someone should be on watch._

The Soldier passes Captain Rogers by and takes a seat on the long cabinet under the motel window. It finds a position which lets it see the two sleeping men, the door, and across the parking lot through a gap in the curtains, and yet also conceals its silhouette from outside the window. It lays the gun on its knees, and keeps watch.

Five hours pass. The Soldier is not certain what the time was when it woke, but its ability to count the passing time is always accurate. The Americans sleep on and there are no disturbances to show that the other agents from HYDRA have found them yet. At intervals, Barnes's body begins to weaken again, and the Soldier finds the eyes closing. That cannot be allowed. It is on watch. The Asset slides out the knife it took from one of the HYDRA men, and pushes the point into the flesh on the exterior of Barnes’s right thigh. Crude, but effective. The jolt of firey pain surges alertness through its limbs again. The Soldier turns its full attention back to the empty parking lot. Someone needs to be on watch. 

It is thirty minutes after dawn when one of the Americans wakes up. The Soldier hears rustling of cloth, and a groan. More movement, and the crack of stiff joints. Then there is silence as Sam Wilson looks about the room and says quietly:

“Shit.”

And then, louder:

“Steve. You better wake up, man.”

There's a thud and then a sudden motion from Steve as he starts awake.

“Hmm? I...what? Oh...oh, _crap_ , I fell asleep, Sam, I'm sorry-”

“Hey, it's okay,” Sam Wilson says, and his voice sounds tense, but the Asset does not know why. “I think Winter has been keeping look out for us, is that right?”

The phrasing is difficult to follow, the tone in conflict with the words. The Asset is unsure how to respond but eventually decides that this was a request for intelligence. It stands up, arms at its sides. It has the gun in its left and the blade in the weaker right. Relaxed but ready.

“Watch maintained for 7.2 hours,” the Soldier informs. “No enemy or target movement detected. No broadcasts or communications received or intercepted. End of report.

“Okay, that's great,” Sam Wilson says and his voice is still strange. “Nothing to report, okay, so we're not in danger right now. Winter, I need to have my gun back.”

The Asset glances down at the gun in its metal hand. It does not have claim to the gun as it has no possessions. It cannot want to keep it as it has no desires. The Asset places the gun down on the cabinet at its side. Sam Wilson steps forward and carefully takes it, immediately ejecting the clip and the chambered round. The Asset recognises that this is a poor decision. Their pursuers could arrive soon, and the gun is the only firearm in this room; it must be kept ready. The actions of Handlers are beyond question, the Asset knows this. But these Handlers...they behave in unpredictable patterns. Everything is confusing. Trying to understand and comply with orders that countermand all its programming is causing a sharp pain in the Soldier's head.

“Why does it smell like blood in here?” Captain Rogers asks at the same moment that Sam Wilson says:

“Winter, is that a knife?”

“Yes,” the Soldier confirms.

“Where the hell did you- Never mind. Can you please put it down as well? Thank you.” Sam Wilson takes the knife too and tucks it into his waistband.

“Wait, Bucky, are you _bleeding_?”

The Soldier glances down to the area on its right thigh. It had been required to make several cuts to the leg in the night to produce enough adrenaline to stay awake, and now the fabric is torn, cold and tacky. “Yes,” it says again. The Americans are staring. Did the Soldier malfunction somehow? It tries to clarify. “Someone needed to be on watch. The clothing is damaged but is repairable.”

“Bucky, what the hell!?” Captain Rogers yells suddenly, marching over from behind the Asset.

Sam Wilson says: “Steve, wait a moment.”

Steve Rogers shouts: “Are you kidding me! For God's sake, Buck, did you actually stab yourself to keep awake because I fell asleep on watch? This is insane. What the hell were you-”

“Steve, don't yell at him-” Sam Wilson says.

The Soldier knows now it must have malfunctioned somehow, it has _fucked up_ , that's what the yelling means, it's fucked up, but it doesn't understand _how._ It falls onto its knees, tucking up and dropping its head, and the fingers interlock behind its neck. It is one fluid motion that has become more than taught: it is pure instinct. The Soldier's ribs and back, where the weight of the arm sits, burn like a fire in protest of the movement but it is just a small pain in what must surely come. Punishment for its mistake. Behavioural correction. The Soldier doesn't know fear, but James Barnes's body still remembers it. Its breathing begins to falter and its hands shake. The Asset doesn't know _how_ to comply when the Handlers change all the rules. It is trying but it doesn't _understand_.

The shouting has stopped. Someone gasps and a voice says:

“What...”

“I yelled at him in the car,” Sam Wilson says, “and he did pretty much the exact same thing. I think he thinks we're going to start fucking beating on him or something.”

“I...what? He can't...” Captain Rogers' voice sounds faint. “What do we do? I don't know what to do.”

“Winter,” Sam Wilson says. “You are not in trouble, okay? Please, you can get up.”

The Soldier does not move, though it feels a tremor passing through James Barnes's body and its breath hitches. It can't follow these orders. It is forgetting too much. It has been too long since the last wipe. The Soldier is unstable. Erratic.

“It's not working! He's terrified...”

Someone moves across the room, and the Asset can't help but tense even though it knows it is impossible to avoid or defend against its punishments. It shouldn't. But no blows fall. Instead, a figure crouches down before it until their eyes are level. The Soldier recognises Steven Rogers, but keeps its head and gaze lowered. Of all his Handlers, only Secretary Pierce permitted the Asset to look at him.

“Bucky, it's okay.” Steven Rogers has a nice voice, the Asset thinks. Kind, but firm. He does not sound angry with the Asset, but it can be difficult to tell. “It's okay. You aren't in trouble, and I'm sorry I yelled. We're not going to hurt you, if that's what you think. I'm not going to let anyone hurt you again. God, will you please just look at me? Can you look at me, Bucky?”

The Soldier slowly drags its gaze up from the floor and manages to flick its eyes to Captain Rogers's face for a second. He does not look angry. He looks sad, which does not make any sense. Nothing makes any sense any more. The Asset quickly drops its gaze, feeling tension twist through its body. It does not _understand._

Captain Rogers sighs.

“Please believe me that we aren't going to punish you, or anything. Right, Sam? I was upset that you were bleeding. That's all. Come on, put your hands down. Stand up, that's it.”

The Asset tries to follow the orders, although its metal arm has locked in place, and it has to use the flesh fingers to shove a plate in the shoulder back into position before it will move. The damaged place in the Soldier's side groans, metal against bone, a deep, bad pain. The Soldier stands. It has not been punished. It does not understand. Stress jabs through James Barnes's body faster than pain and curdles into nausea. The Asset's eyes are watering, dripping salt onto its face.

“Jesus,” mutters Sam Wilson, and then, louder he says; “I'll get the first aid kit.”

“Okay. Bucky, let's... Buck, please don't cry. It's going to be okay. Look, Sam needs to take a look at your leg. He's going to patch you up; he's like a...uh, a med tech. Okay? Don’t cry. I'm really sorry, but can you please take your sweatpants off? Okay, great, that's really good, buddy. Come and sit down....Okay, not the chair, that's fine. Not the chair. How about the bed instead, yeah? All right. Sam?”

Sam Wilson has a green box. He is pulling blue gloves onto his hands.

“Winter,” he says, as he approaches. “I have to clean and bandage the cuts on your leg. It's possible you might need some stitches. You need to sit really still for me, okay?” 

The Soldier doesn’t answer but it remains still. It must not interfere with the work of the med techs.

Then, quietly and quickly to someone else, Sam Wilson says; “I'm worried about how much he's zoning out. Can you try and keep him present?”

Sam Wilson ducks down and then he and Captain Rogers are both crouching in front of the Asset. Close, far too close. The Asset's body is twitching, and its breathing hitches as Sam Wilson reaches towards it, and then the inside of its head _scrambles_ and its thoughts start to run blank like radio static but then someone is holding Barnes's hand and pressing a shape firmly into the palm. The Asset wants to snatch the hand away, but something deeper and more instinctual draws its attention and it finds itself stilling and following the movement of the fingers instead, in smooth circles on the palm. There is calmness there, round and round and round. It remembers looking down the scope of a rifle and breathing out slowly with the target who stands in the crosshairs. This feels the same.

“Hey, Bucky,” Captain Rogers says, and the Soldier blinks, dragging its eyes to the man's shoulder. “I want you to stay with us if you can, so I'm going to ask you some questions, okay? I want you to tell me your answers. Can you do that?”

The Soldier twitches hard, but that was an order. Words seem to have fled deep into its head, but it manages to drag one onto its tongue.

“Да,” it says, and then stops still. The flesh hand starts to shake. It used the right word but wrong at the same time; these American Handlers only use one language and now they will-

“It's okay, that's good,” says Captain Rogers. “It's okay if you want to use Russian, Bucky, I don't mind. Okay, can you tell me, does your leg hurt?”

“Нет,” says the Asset.

Captain Rogers frowns but doesn't argue. The Asset can feel the pull and pressure on its leg where the wound it inflicted on Barnes's body is being cleaned by Sam Wilson, but it doesn't look down, doesn't let on that the feeling of the touch is screaming danger and making its skin crawl and all it wants to do is shoot everyone and go _home._ It doesn't even know what that means.

“Do you know who I am?” Captain Rogers asks and the Asset drags its attention back and answers;

“Да,” because yes, of course it knows; Steven Rogers is the mission after all.

“Are you hungry at all?” he asks.

The Asset answers “Нет.”

“Can you remember leaving DC, leaving the city?” says Captain Rogers. “You found us at a motel, do you remember how you knew where we were?”

Yes, the Asset remembers. “Put tracking dot on your car,” it says. “At кладбище.”

Captain Rogers glances at his phone. “You were following us the whole time since the cemetery? Oh.”

And then, just as the Asset is thinking that this punishment is not so bad at all, Steven Rogers asks; “Why were you so frightened of us just now?” and the Asset feels itself freeze up. It has been ordered to answer but it does not know what the answer is and it doesn't have the words to-

Pulse pounding, the Asset opens and closes its mouth but nothing comes out and it can't-

“Hey,” says Steven Rogers. “Hey, it's alright. If you don't know the answer you can just shrug, okay? That's allowed. Like this, see? And if you don't want to talk, you can nod or shake your head.”

The Asset imitates the shrugging motion that Captain Rogers just made. Its own is lopsided because of the damaged shoulder plates and the sharp, unrelenting pain deep under its ribs, but Captain Rogers doesn't seem to mind. They move on with the questions and it's much easier now the Soldier doesn't have to keep the words untangled in its head and remember how to speak. Some of the questions are easy: does Sam call you Winter (nod), do you like that name (shrug), does this hurt (shake), are the walls in here painted yellow (nod), can you see five lightbulbs, one TV, two beds (nod, nod, nod). Is your mission still suspended (nod). Other questions are not so easy: do you know what is wrong with the metal arm (shrug), can you fix it (shake), do you understand that we're not going to hurt you (shrug), do you know why you can't heal (shrug).

The next questions - “Do you remember anything from before? From before HYDRA took you, when we were friends?” - almost overwhelm the Asset, sending it spiralling deep into Barnes's head, but there is that circle on its hand again and it is dragged back into the bright world of Steven Rogers. Its shrug then is little more than a twitch.

At some point, the tug of thread through skin stops, and Sam Wilson is carefully pressing his fingers to the Asset's meat wrist and counting. Then he lifts the Assets clothing, and peers at its side. The Asset feels the press of fingers on the area on its side where the worst stabs of pain come that steal its breath and make the metal fingers twitch. It just manages not to lash out. It must not damage the med techs. After an agonising time, Sam Wilson stops touching and says; “There. All done.” He steps back away from the Asset. Steven Rogers breathes out a long sigh.

“You did great, Bucky,” he says with a tired smile. “All patched up. But I really want to make sure you understand this. You mustn't hurt yourself, okay? If you are tired, you can go to sleep. You don't have to injure yourself to keep awake. Do you understand?”

“It didn't hurt,” the Asset says. Captain Rogers frowns, and the Asset thinks perhaps it messed up the words again. It clamps its mouth shut and doesn't say anything and they leave it alone. Captain Rogers takes a shower and changes his t-shirt for one without blood down the front. Sam Wilson gives the Asset a new pair of the soft grey pants without knife cuts in to wear, an ice pack, a pill, and a bottle of orange juice and then the Americans go out of the room into the parking lot. The Asset can see them outside through the window, talking. It positions the ice pack over the bad place on its side and the soothing cold seeps into its bones. It is comforting, like the quiet ice where the Asset is sent, where all of its pain and fear are folded away into the cold dark. But this is not the ice it craves, only a thin imitation. It is for healing, and yet another sign of weakness in the body it inhabits. The Asset picks at the bandage on its right thigh and tries not to shiver. It puts on the sweatpants and then the too-thin shoes. It is still cold. The jacket, holsters and boots it usually wears are not in the room. The knife and the gun are nowhere in sight. The Asset does not like to be unarmed. It takes the pill, drinks the orange juice and doesn’t read the Americans’ lips.

The Americans talk for a long time, although both of them often look back in through the window at the Asset. When they come back in, Sam Wilson says it is time to leave. They do not tell the Asset where they are going or give it a mission briefing. The Americans take their few belongings out to the car, and then Captain Rogers asks the Asset if it is cold. He asks the Asset if it would like a jacket. The Soldier thinks about it for a long time. It might be a test. New Handlers usually give it tests to check its compliance. But maybe it is not a test. Maybe it will miss the chance to be warm.

So the Asset says: “Yes.” And then it adds; “Please.”

Captain Rogers smiles and puts a brown jacket on the end of the bed where the Asset is sitting. The Asset drags it over and pulls it on, slowly, so as not to lock the arm up. The jacket smells of pine and motor oil. It is not unpleasant. Then Captain Rogers directs the Asset into the bathroom, and then afterwards the Soldier follows him out into the parking lot and gets into the back of the car. Sam Wilson and Steven Rogers talk together for a moment, and then they also get into the car at the front. Captain Rogers drives them away from the motel. They are going to get breakfast, he says.

It is very quiet. The Soldier stares at the glass of the window as they drive. Outside, the world passes in a swirl; green, red, grey, brown. A flash of white for a house. The Asset sees that nothing is clear like this and that the shapes are lost and the colours blur themselves together.

The Americans are talking quietly, and the Asset is not sure if it is supposed to be paying attention or not. It hears the name that Sam Wilson calls it.

“...Winter called me from your phone just as I was leaving town, I got back there as fast as I could. Was fairly sure you were both dead when I walked in; man, it was a massacre. And, dude, how did they even find us? We were totally off the grid.”

“I've been wondering about that too,” says Captain Rogers. “I told perhaps three people that we were leaving DC, and no-one precisely where we were going.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

Captain Rogers looks back at the Asset in the mirror.

“Bucky, do you remember what happened at the cabin?”

The Asset does. “Я убил их,” he says. “The men.”

“Those men attacked us,” Steven Rogers says, nodding. “You saved me, saved my life when I was shot. Thank you.”

The Asset has nothing to say, so it remains quiet.

“Hey.” This time it is Sam Wilson talking. He turns to look at the Asset. “After I arrived, you told me that more soldiers were coming, remember? Can you tell us how you knew that?”

The Asset frowns. There was a question there but it was too complicated to decipher. Sam Wilson changes his question.

“Okay, are there more soldiers coming now?”

“Да,” the Asset confirms.

“How will they find us? How did they know we were at the cabin?” Captain Rogers says.

The Soldier can feel the words scrambling themselves in its head even as it tries to grasp them. “Arm,” it says, and jabs a finger towards the crook of its left elbow, where the tracking dot is located. “Истинный рука. They...follow.”

“There's a tracker in your arm,” says Sam Wilson, slowly. “Oh. _Shit._ They've known where we were the whole time. There's no way they’ll believe we were killed in the explosion.”

“Can we take it out?” Captain Rogers asks. “The tracker?”

If the Asset told Steven Rogers yes, and he was then to remove that particular panel in its arm, the device would detonate with enough force to decommission the Asset and kill anyone standing close by. Steven Rogers would be dead. Mission success.

“Bзрыв,” the Asset says.

“Explosives,” Sam Wilson reads out the translation from his cell phone. “ _Jesus_. Fucking HYDRA.”

“I really, really have to call Tony,” says Captain Rogers.

They drive east for twenty-two minutes before he pulls the car into the parking lot of a low building. It is hemmed about by bright neon signs and billboards in garish, nightmare colours. Steven Rogers goes into the building to buy food for the two Americans. The Asset knows by now that it will be given only poison to eat. That is, after all, its punishment. Sam Wilson goes to the trunk of the car and then comes around to the Asset's door. He opens it, and then steps back. The Asset remembers this; it unclips the restraining belt and turns his legs so that they are out of the car.

“Okay, big guy, breakfast time. You have two options of cold mush: beef, tomato and brown rice, or sweet potato and cranberry?”

Sam Wilson is holding out two small glass jars with his left hand. The Asset is unsure what is being asked of it, but knows better than to ask. It looks from the jars back to Sam Wilson and waits. The man sighs.

“You're gonna eat the contents of one of these jars,” he explains. “I want you to choose one you like.”

The Asset is bewildered. Why should it have a preference in anything not related to weaponry or tactics? Being permitted to choose small details of its punishment makes no sense. Is this another test? It has not been told that questions are permitted, so it sits in silence.

“Too tricky? Okay, let’s see...” Sam Wilson says, and he takes the cap off both jars. Then he takes a long sniff over the contents of each. “God, I'm so hungry that even this crap is starting to smell good. Okay, now you. Tell me which one smells better to you.”

He places both jars on the ground and steps back. The Asset leans forward to pick them up, one in each hand, but as it moves the left arm, that loose thing inside the shoulder shifts and sparks. The arm spasms agonisingly and the fingers twitch and jerk. For a long moment the Soldier can only freeze half uncurled, breathing hard, until the things inside shifts again and the sparking pains fade out. Sam Wilson is still watching though, waiting for his compliance.

"You okay?"

The Asset completes the motion and picks up the two jars. It sniffs the yellow jar in its right hand. The contents smells vaguely like food, even though the Asset knows this is a lie and the stuff will twist in its belly until it vomits. It sniffs the second jar. This one is the colour of old blood, and it smells bad bad bad, like the way their flesh crisped and sizzled after the gas ignited and the stench of it blew over on the mountain wind, and clung to the Soldier’s clothes and hair as it waited for extraction and breathed in the smell of burning hair and meat, and watched the flames on the snow.

There is a crunch, and the Asset receives feedback that its metal hand has moved. The jar has been crushed, and red mush all fractured up with thin shards of glass is oozing between its metal fingers. The Asset stares at it with trepidation. It has broken the vessel it was given. It was Sam Wilson's jar, and the Asset has broken it. It takes a breath, and does not look up at Sam Wilson, fearing the anger that it will surely see-

“Oops!” Sam Wilson says, lightly. “Not the beef then. I hope that was you indicating that you didn't like it, because I think that was the only one of that flavour we had. Okay, just drop it onto the floor - outside the car, jeez, this ain’t a rental - and I'll get a towel. Though how we're supposed to get that crap out of all those joints is beyond me.”

Sam Wilson is not a mech tech and is therefore not permitted to touch the arm. The Asset reminds him of this when he returns with the cloth and then the Asset cleans the red off the plates as well as it can itself. Then it leans out of the car to rinse off the remainder with water. It has no knife and no maintenance kit, and therefore some red remains wedged between the joints no matter how hard it picks at it.

In the distance, the Asset hears Steven Rogers' voice. It sees him step out of the civilian building, with packages in one hand and the other at his ear. He turns away from them, leaning on a fence. He is speaking on the phone.

“Okay man, that'll do,” Sam Wilson says, gesturing to the arm. “I’d almost eat my lunch off that thing now. Here, your chosen mush awaits. Eat up.”

The Soldier picks up the yellow jar once again, and takes the spoon. The ‘mush’ is strongly flavoured, cold and heavy on its tongue. The taste of it awakes the pain of the unceasing cramping emptiness that permeates Barnes' body, and the Asset is trapped between the need to shovel all of the contents into its mouth as quickly as it can, and the urge to vomit. The cold poison slips down its throat even as its chest tightens and ugly tears push out of its eyes. The punishments that these new Handlers have created for it are more subtle and cruel than anything of HYDRA’s devising.

It only manages half the jar before its stomach churns and cramps again, and it throws up, yellow and red, onto the surface of the parking lot. The tears are still dripping down its face as Sam Wilson says, softly;

“Aw, come on, man. You just can't get a break can you?”

The Soldier is given a wet cloth to wipe its face and more water to drink, and eventually the tears stop. Then Steven Rogers is crossing back over to them, putting his phone into his pocket.

“And?” Sam Wilson says, as he approaches.

“He agreed, although he's not happy about it,” Captain Rogers replies. “Hell, I'm not happy about it, so I guess we got one thing in common. But he says we shouldn’t try to disable or remove the tracker, and with HYDRA trailing us...”

He tosses Sam a wrapped package, and then glances down at the Asset. The Asset quickly shifts its gaze away so that their eyes don't meet by accident. Sam Wilson has unwrapped the food item and it smells of meat and grease. The Asset feels bile rising in its throat, so it pulls the sweatshirt neck up over his mouth and nose, pulls its feet in, and closes the car door to trap the smell outside. The Americans sit down on the bonnet of the car to eat their meal, and they either do not know or do not care that the Asset can hear their conversation through the glass.

“Hey, you got hold of food and help,” Sam Wilson is saying, after a sigh. “So you had more success than I did. It has been another puke-and-tears fest out here. This can't go on, Steve. There was some blood just now, I think he's starting to injure his throat by vomiting so much. He needs his ribs and side looking at too. They're really fucked up; I honestly don't know how he's still upright. Every time he uses the arm he does more internal damage.”

“I know, Sam. I've asked Tony to reach out to anyone he knows of, but he's not...feeling that helpful right now. I know he'll come round though, as soon as he sees the arm. And there is a great medical team on hand at Sta- Avengers Tower. They are used to...unusual people. I just wish this felt like the right thing to do.”

“I know, man. Are you sure about trusting SHIELD again, after all that shit in DC?”

“I don’t trust SHIELD. I doubt I ever will again. But it’s not like I’m letting them drag Bucky off in chains. He’s going to Avengers Tower, so he’s our business and not SHIELD’s. He’s a former Prisoner of War in rehabilitation, not a captive. That is never happening again.”

“Can you even do that? I mean, can the Avengers even take legal custody in a situation like that?”

“Could SHIELD? I don’t think there is any precedent for what we’re going to be dealing with. But Bucky stays with me, whatever happens.”

“I agree that there's not a lot of options on the table at this juncture. Not with HYDRA still on our tail. But is he going to understand? We do not want him freaking out."

The Americans have finished their meal and Steven Rogers is coming around to the side door and opening it. The Asset tenses at his proximity, but Steven Rogers steps back quickly until he is not so close. He crouches down, like he did at the room they had slept in. The Asset drops its eyes to the man's torso; that way it can most effectively see if he moves either of his hands towards weapons.

“Hey Bucky,” the Captain says. “How are you feeling?”

The Soldier tells him; “Mech tech required for major arm repair.”

Captain Rogers winces. “Okay, buddy, I hear you. How about the rest of you?”

“Moderate biological and mechanical malfunction.”

“Are you still cold? Those ice packs on your side doing anything for the pain?”

The Asset isn't sure of the answers to those questions, so it employs the half-shrugging motion again. That makes Captain Rogers smile again, briefly.

“Okay, Bucky. Listen, I need you to understand what's going on. We are going to head to New York, where a good friend of mine lives. Tony is very good with machinery and he's going to try fix the metal arm so it doesn't hurt you as much. He's a...mech tech, you could say. He also knows a lot of good doctors who might be able to fix you up. Does that sound okay?”

The Asset doesn't know. Repairing the arm is necessary to regain mission-ready condition. That is good. But doctors...doctors are bad. Half-shrug. Nod.

“Okay, good. Sam and I are going to be with you the whole time. And we won't get there for a couple of days yet. So just relax, and let me know if you start to feel bad, okay?”

The Soldier loses some time then, and next thing he knows the car is moving again and Sam Wilson is driving. They are heading east. The Soldier wants to sleep but it is not sure that it is permitted.

In the front seat, Sam Wilson suddenly says: “So Steve, you never did tell me how you guys met. You knew each other before the war, right?”

“Yeah, I've known Bucky pretty much my entire life,” Steven Rogers replies, and turns to smile at the Soldier. The Soldier just stares at him. Captain Rogers continues to talk; he says place names like Brooklyn and school and Coney Island, and then Italy, London and Austria, but none of it has tactical application. James Barnes's ghost is swirling around inside the soldier, pulsing at the words, struggling against the bonds of flesh. The Asset forces it down. 

After perhaps thirty minutes, it realises that Steven Rogers is turning in his seat to look at it and Sam Wilson has just spoken.

“Winter, are you...Oh hey, there you are. Are you feeling okay, man?”

The Asset just shrugs and looks out of the window. They are remarkably concerned with how the Asset is feeling.

“Hey, Bucky,” This time it is Steven Rogers speaking. “Is there anything you want to ask? I mean, I've thrown a load of questions at you this morning. If there's anything you want to know, you can ask us whatever you like.”

The Asset considers for a moment, surprised. It is seldom allowed to talk, outside of tactical situations.

“Questions are permitted?” It states, for clarification.

“Sure, Bucky, of course.”

“Okay. Who the hell is Bucky?”


	8. Steve

Steve physically cannot answer for a moment.

“I'm sorry?” he manages. In the backseat behind them, Bucky frowns. 

“Bucky,” The Winter Soldier says again. “What does Bucky mean?”

“You are Bucky,” Steve says, firmly, but his heart is racing, pouring cold ice into his veins all over again. Bucky still doesn't remember. “It’s a nickname. A shorter version of your full name, James Buc-”

“James Buchanan Barnes,” Bucky says, losing for a moment his usual odd monotone. “Sergeant. 32557038. Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield. Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country."

“Did you just- Did he just remember that?” Sam says. “That's...”

Steve shakes his head, but grasps as much hope as he can from those straws. “That’s the voiceover from the museum, from the exhibition. Buck, that means you went to the Smithsonian, right? What were you looking for?”

“Intel. Probable target movements.” Bucky says.

“What did you find?” Sam asks. Bucky seems to struggle for a moment, and then spits out:

“Lügen,” and then, “Американская пропаганда.”

Steve doesn’t need to glance at the translation on his phone to understand that. He keeps his eyes on Bucky, not daring to turn back. This feels like a critical moment. They have to convince Bucky of who he really is, or it’s all going to be lost before it is begun. It’s not the conversation to be having in a car with HYDRA on their tail, but there’s no choice right now.

“Not all lies, Bucky,” he says, firmly. “Okay, so I can’t argue with you about the propaganda, and sure, they got your damn birthdate wrong. But the most important stuff - that _is_ true. You and me - we have been friends our entire lives. Even when I had nothing, I had you. You must have seen the pictures, the recordings.”

“Yes,” says Bucky.

“Then you saw the proof there, proof of who you are. You _are_ James Barnes. You are Bucky.”

“No.” Bucky pushes forward against his seatbelt as if he is trying to physically get away from the discussion. Steve can hear the metal plates in the arm click and scrape as they realign, servos whirring. The Soldier is nervous, ready to fight. “Er ist tot,” Bucky says, through gritted teeth. “Er war ein schlechter Mensch und jetzt ist er tot.”

“No, Bucky, that’s not what happened. The museum got that wrong. We _thought_ you were dead. Everyone did. For seventy years, they thought we were both dead. But instead we, both of us, survived, we came back. You’re Bucky and you are alive.”

“James Barnes ist tot.” Bucky says again, and he sounds exhausted. Steve wants to cry. 

Sam casts a warning eye at Steve. He’s probably concerned that Steve is pushing Bucky into some kind of breakdown by pressuring him about the lies HYDRA had fed him. But Steve can’t bear to hear those toxic words emerging from his friend’s mouth. And what was that crap about James Barnes being a bad person?

“Hey, man,” Sam says, from the driving seat. “Winter. How about instead you tell us what you know about who you are? What can you remember about where you come from?”

Bucky issues a long stream of Russian then, so fast that Steve’s phone can’t pick it up. But it’s not just the speed; the intonation is all wrong too, and it sounds like Bucky is again just repeating something he has heard said, word for word. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, trying to catch his eye. “Buck. We don’t understand. I’m sorry, I really want to know what you’re saying. But you gotta try in English for us.”

Bucky snaps his head to one side in something that looks like frustration. He opens his mouth to speak and nothing comes out. He raises a fist and smacks the side of his own head, sharply. 

“Woah, dude, don’t do that-” Sam starts, but then Bucky is speaking again.

“They kill him,” he says, in the strongest Russian accent either of them have heard. “Take. Pull him out. Put Asset in.”

Then Bucky clamps his jaw shut, burrows down into the hoodie and won’t say another word.

Steve just sits in the passenger seat, and tries not to cry or throw up or generally to give any other externally observable sign of what feels like an imminent nervous breakdown. He’d wedged the shield into the footwell, just so it was close-by, and now he runs his fingers along the smooth rim like a talisman. It’s not helping much.

He can feel Bucky’s- no, definitely the Winter Soldier’s- eyes on the back of his neck, peering from the shadowed space between the curl of the hood and the neckline he’s burrowed into. It’s like the first time Steve had seen Bucky in this century, on the rooftop outside his apartment. Steve had Nick Fury’s blood on his hands, rage and grief in his throat, and there was the Winter Soldier. Face encased in dark hair and hard metal, and his eyes so full of pain and confusion that it was bleeding from him like black paint. Steve glances back again, and then wishes he hadn’t. Bucky has the fabric of the hoodie pulled up over his nose again, like he’s still wearing that damn mask. That _muzzle_. It hid his face, but Steve can’t help but think concealment wasn’t its main purpose. _That_ had been to constrain and silence and control. Like a feral animal. Steve feels his fists creak, and then he is struck by an image. The last time the Winter Soldier had been sent to kill them at the Triskelion he hadn’t been wearing a mask. Sure, Steve had torn it off during the fight in the overpass, but the HYDRA guys were always well equipped. They had to have multiples of all the Soldier’s gear on hand. So why hadn’t he been given a new mask?

Steve had seen the Winter Soldier’s face. He had been identified as Bucky Barnes. Therefore there was no value in keeping him hidden any longer. Perhaps they hoped the sight of his friend’s face would rattle Steve into doing something stupid (it had). Perhaps they knew how pointless it was now to hide Bucky any longer. They knew Steve would descend on them with a fury hotter than a thousand suns when he found out what they had done to- 

No. That wasn’t it. That was just hubris talking, blinding him to something else, something darker. Think. They had sent Bucky to the Triskelion to- to do what? To kill Steve and Nat, Bucky had told them as much himself. Not to protect HYDRA men, or the helicarriers. Sure, he had grabbed the control crystal from Steve in the fight, but that was more to get Steve’s attention. He could have easily crushed it, even in his flesh hand, if his mission was to prevent Steve’s sabotage and ensure the launch. He has always been separate from HYDRA’s master plan. He was - 

And then Steve sees the truth his thoughts have been skirting around for days.

“Oh,” he breathes. And then, _“Shit.”_

Sam turns to him. “Dude, anything that has you swearing has me worried. What the hell is it?”

“He wasn’t masked on the helicarrier,” Steve says, forcing strength into his voice. “Bucky wasn’t masked. He was never meant to make it out of there.”

“Wait, what? But they needed him. I thought the Winter Soldier was supposed to be their perfect asset, or whatever. Their greatest weapon.”

“He was,” Steve clarifies, trying not to feel a chill at Sam’s phrasing. “But if HYDRA had gotten those helicarriers in the air...A thousand hostiles a minute, anywhere on the globe? They didn’t need him anymore. It’s like trading up a scalpel for an atom bomb.”

Sam whistles. “They’d just leave him there to die? After all that...decades of training and everything?”

“Well, it’s pretty clear he didn’t make it back to HYDRA after he left me at the river, if only from the state of his arm. He keeps telling us he needs repairs. It’s because no one did them for him.”

“Hill raided a HYDRA base at some old bank in DC and a bunch of other safehouses while you were in the hospital,” Sam says. “They were all cleaned out. Seemed like whatever was left of HYDRA just turned tail and ran.”

“Perhaps they thought the Winter Soldier had been killed. Either way, they abandoned him.” Steve concluded. “He had nowhere to go. Well, we heard what he said earlier; he went to the museum for intel. no one gave him new orders so he continued with the last he had – killing me - and just got information the best way he could.”

“Wait, wait,” Sam is shaking his head. “If they don’t want him, what the hell was that invasion force back at the cabin? Just some really aggressive door-to-door missionaries?”

Steve hesitated, thinking. “Maybe HYDRA are trying to take him back now that Insight failed…?”

Sam is still disagreeing. “Think about it, man. His cover is blown. You’ve seen him, and so have Fury and Hill and most of SHIELD. It’s a miracle no facial recognition software has picked his face out of the footage yet, or that shit'd be plastered all over the news. But we know now, who he is, what they did. Even if he were healthy, he’s no use to HYDRA as a secret weapon anymore. And if Barnes ever gets his memory back, and if any of those HYDRA assholes end up in court, then who knows what damage he could do to them in the witness stand. We got it wrong, Steve. Those guys weren’t extraction. They were _execution_. They just came in to tidy up their loose ends. Maybe they’d have taken his body to hide the evidence, or so they could keep the arm, but I don’t think they want him alive. They especially won’t now, not after what happened at the cabin. They know now they’ve lost too much control.”

“So if HYDRA can’t have him,” Steve concludes, heart heavy with dull horror. “Then no one can.”

There is silence for a moment, as both of them consider the implications of what they’ve just realised. Then Sam says:

“So if they don’t want Barnes alive, and you and I are supposed to be dead anyway, why haven't they just killed us all already? If they’re tracking the arm, they must have noticed us turn south; sooner or later they'll figure out that means we’re taking him to New York. What is stopping them just wiping us all out?”

It is, of course, exactly at that moment that Steve hears a distant metallic click beneath the car. He draws a breath to yell “ _Grenade_ !” but before he can make a sound the road beneath them explodes. A wave of white noise and light and heat smashes into them, and there is a disconcerting weightlessness as the car is blasted up into the air. Then they are rolling and Steve is thrown hard against his seat belt and then his head strikes glass. Someone is yelling and everything is a daze of crushed and screeching metal as they impact over and over and it all goes black and white, in and out, until finally they are still. Steve gasps a breath, barely conscious. He is upside down, hanging from the seatbelt; there is smoke everywhere and he can’t see, he can’t _breathe._ His lungs are full of the stench of burnt fibres and scorched metal and fuel and _blood_. Steve drags his heavy head round, and through the smoke there is Sam, hanging beside him. He's not moving. Blood is pouring down his face and off his head; the wheel and the airbag are crushed up against his body and Steve can’t see him breathing. Steve tries to yell for Bucky but nothing more than a gasp of air comes out. The space behind him is silent. Then, he hears an engine from across the field. Someone is coming.

Steve starts to struggle, trying to drag his legs free from under his shield. He can’t get down and he can’t get free, and the others _aren't moving_. He snatches at the seat belt buckle; it’s mashed in the wreck of the door, but he tears at the strap and the belt snaps. He drops down onto the ceiling of the car, the weight of his body dragging his left leg free and shooting agony down his neck and legs. 

"Bucky. Sam,” he coughs, trying to drag his arms under him. Then, suddenly, there is a movement from the back, and Steve sees Bucky - _alive, he's alive_ \- scrambling forwards, sliding along the roof of the car. He looks like he could reach Sam. Steve gasps in relief and shoves a section of the dash away to drag the shield loose and free his leg. He twists, shoving the shield against the window to smash out the remaining glass. The engines are closer. Bucky is leaning over. They have to get out. Together, they can- 

Metal fingers close over his throat. Steve freezes, ice to his core; he sees Bucky above him, tense, wild, utterly alien. “Bucky...” he tries to say, but no sound comes out. This isn’t Bucky. They had thought he was making progress; talking, remembering, trusting them. It’s all gone in the blink of an eye. 

_ “Молчи!” _ The Winter Soldier viciously shoves the metal fingers hard under Steve’s jaw, forcing him down onto the ceiling by the throat. He doesn't let go, pining Steve there as he turns to Sam, still hanging there unmoving, and runs his flesh hand through the blood pulsing from Sam’s head. The Soldier brings the bloodied hand back and smears the gore in splashes all over its own face. He looks like a ghost. A nightmare.

“Buck, please.” Steve pleads, but the Soldier just tightens his grip in warning, and then he scoops another handful of Sam’s blood and slathers it over Steve’s face too. It goes into his eyes and mouth. 

The engines outside cut out and there are voices. The Soldier lets go of Steve’s throat suddenly and dives across him, grabbing the strap of the shield where it’s still wedged in the window space, and then the world erupts as gunfire strafes the car. The bullets shred through the metal of the chassis and glass shatters around them, and over it all is the familiar thud as bullets rebound off the shield and echo into the tiny sanctuary behind it that is keeping them all alive. The firing goes on and on before suddenly there is silence, almost as deafening. They have to get out. Steve shifts, about to do he doesn’t even know what, but then the blade of the Ka-Bar knife they took off Bucky earlier is shoved under his chin. 

“Bu-”

“Не шевелись,” the Soldier hisses. “Shut the fuck up.” 

The Winter Soldier dunks the knife blade into another pool of Sam’s blood and then he is scrambling back between the seats and kicking his way out through the rear door and out of the car. He's gone. He has left them.

Outside, Steve can hear yelling and the clatter of automatic rifles being cocked, and then the Soldier’s voice, a cold, flat tone, speaking in Russian. Someone says “Hold your fire!” and another voice yells;

“It’s the Asset!”

“Jesus fucking Christ, look at it...” 

“Hold your fire!” the authoritative voice repeats, but now it sounds tense as a bow string. Steve tilts his head; the sunlight is blazing into his eyes, but beyond the rim of the shield he can just see the roadway and the field beyond. Three black vehicles, a dozen figures and the Winter Soldier, hand glinting in the sun.

“Soldat.” One of the figures is standing before the Soldier. “I am an approved Incidence Handler, ident code _"Жук-Пять-цапля-Четыре-Юрий"_. Confirm your recognition and compliance. In English.”

“Ready to comply,” says the Winter Soldier with Bucky Barnes’ mouth.

“Mission report,” says the Handler.

“Alpha target Captain Steven Rogers is eliminated,” says the Winter Soldier, low. “Confirmed death exceeds permitted mission time limit by 302 hours.”

“He in that car?”

“Yes. Sir.”

“Soldat. Turn in your weapons.” There is silence for a moment, and then; “That’s it? One knife?”

“Yes. Sir.”

“You and you. Search the Asset. Weber, check the wreckage.”

Steve sees the shape of the Winter Soldier silhouetted against the streaming light. Sees the right arm, bent at the elbow, rise and fall once, twice. Could be mistaken as a tick, a nervous movement prompted by the approaching soldiers. But Steve knows what he saw and how to read the gesture. _Get down. Take cover._ An act. Everything Bucky is doing is an act. 

Then he hears the sound of approaching feet. He has only seconds before the boots arrive and Bucky needs him to take cover. He holds a shallow breath, lets his eyes and mouth hang slightly open, and slumps still. He’s dealt enough death to know how it looks. The blood on his face will hopefully do the rest. There is a scraping sound, and the shield is dragged clear of the window. Through his half-closed lashes, Steve sees a burst of shrouded daylight, black boots through the smoke, and then the shadow of a face peering into the wreck. As desperately as he wants Sam to make some sound or movement so that Steve can tell if he's alive, he also prays that Sam doesn't choose this exact moment.

“Christ,” he hears the owner of the boots say. Then there’s a sudden sharp jab in his ribs as the owner of the boots prods at the apparent corpse of Captain America with the barrel of his Colt M4A1. Steve lets the shove roll him slightly and then falls back.

“Fuckin’ shame.” Boots mutters. Then he stands up and turns away, calling. “He’s dead. There’s another one in here too.”

Boots tosses the shield back towards the wreck. It rolls and lands against the window, partially obscuring the inside of the car. Steve can just see out, across the haze and smoke across the field; three vehicles and perhaps fifteen dark-clad figures. In the centre, the Winter Soldier’s metal arm glints like a beacon. This is Steve’s chance. To make the most of the time Bucky has won for them and get Sam out. But Boots is still standing only a few feet away, and Steve hears the click of a lighter, and then smells the waft of cigarette smoke. The moment Steve moves, the man will see. And Sam is still trapped.

The HYDRA Handler is talking again. “Captain Rogers termination is confirmed, Asset,” he says. “Your mission is complete. You will return with us to base for processing. Indicate compliance.”

“Incorrect,” states the Winter Soldier, flatly.

“What?” The Handler says, clearly taken aback. 

Boots shifts slightly, but just keeps smoking.

“Incorrect,” repeats the Soldier. “The second target, Natalia Alianovna Romanova, remains alive. The mission is not complete.”

There is a sharp crack that echoes across the clearing. Through the haze, Steve sees the Handler step back, lowering his hand. 

“Forget her.” The Handler snaps. “She is no longer of importance. You will comply.”

“But,” Winter sounds dazed. “The mission is not compl-“

There is another slap as the Handler strikes him again. Steve is tense as a coiled spring.

“Comply!”

“Harris,” another man says, and Steve sees him jump down from one of the vehicles. “We don’t have time for this. Blues will be inbound. Decommission it and we’ll just hack the arm off here if we have to.”

“Yes, you’re right,” agrees the Handler abruptly. He turns to Bucky. “Soldat,” he says. “Turn around. Kneel down.” Then he pulls a black object out of his coat.

“Weber!” The newer man shouts. “Torch that wreck. Squad, prepare to move out!”

Across the clearing, Steve sees the shadow that is Bucky kneel down in the mud. The Handler raises the thing in his hand, the gun, and just like that, they are suddenly out of time. 

Boots steps away from the car, and then several things seem to happen all at the same time. Steve sees, across the field, the Handler lining the pistol up against the back of Bucky’s head. He hears a click as Boots’s cigarette lighter flares into life again, followed instantly by a _whooom_ as the spilled fuel all around the car ignites in a rush. In that instant, Steve has an epiphany. He knows he has about ten seconds before the entire car goes up. He is no longer trapped; it is enough time for him to get to the shield, cross the clearing, and save Bucky. Or it’s enough time for him to stay and rescue Sam. It is not enough time for him to do both. 

One of them is going to die, and he has to choose.

As Steve wastes a second frozen in crippling, fatal inaction, the decision is made for him. There is the sharp crack of a gunshot and in the same instant, a flash of metal like lightning across the clearing. The Winter Soldier has snatched the gun from behind his head faster than thought, and one of the men falls back, his face blown away. Then the clearing explodes into gunfire.

Eight seconds before the car burns. Steve throws himself towards Sam, tearing the seatbelt out with his bare hands, even as his boots are kicking out the remaining glass. Sam’s body drops like a stone and Steve grabs him, dragging and kicking the two of them out through the shattered windshield. He throws a hand to the side as he rolls them, and snatches up his shield, slinging it onto his back. There’s a yell from somewhere and bullets start smacking into the dirt around them. Steve drops as low as he can, pulling Sam up and then half-staggers, half-runs back towards the road they rolled from, keeping the wreckage between him and the HYDRA guns. More bullets are impacting into the carcass of the car, some few ping off the shield. One hits him somewhere, but he can’t stop; there’s only four seconds left. He trips and Sam almost falls from his hands. Three seconds and he’s hurling Sam’s limp form into a ditch at the edge of the road, two seconds and he’s throwing himself in too, one second, and-

The car doesn’t just catch fire, it explodes like a fourth-of-July firework as the bag of ordnance the Winter Soldier stashed in the boot detonates, igniting bullets and shrapnel in every direction. Steve stays down, covering Sam as best he can until the noise stops and the smoke is billowing around them. Then he’s up on his knees, rolling Sam over onto his back in pure terror, without even the breath to pray...But Sam is already moving, sluggishly. He coughs; clutches at his head with a moan.

“What the fuck...” Sam mumbles. 

“Sam, stay down!” Steve tells him, staggering up. “We got trouble. I gotta get to Bucky. Don’t move!”

He sprints back into the billowing smoke, following the shouts and groans and gunshots. A heavily armed strike team of fifteen against one? Those were bad odds, even for a fully healthy Winter Soldier. And now he’s sick and half starved, with a busted arm and no weapons and no cover and no back-up... Steve hurls the shield at the first shape that moves, smashing the HYDRA soldier’s face in. The guy drops with a groan and Steve snatches the Carbine from his hands as he falls, shooting another through the chest. Multiple voices are yelling indistinguishably. Then the smoke swells and clears, and he sees three more bodies on the ground, seven still standing firing wildly at one of the vehicles, and the Winter Soldier, bloody and ragged behind it, and still shooting, getting one of his assailants through the head. The HYDRA guy drops, even as Steve runs up, shooting another dead and launching his shield at a third. Four left. The gun is empty.

“Bucky!” He yells. Guns turn on him and he dives to the side, rolling with the shield. On the ground by the truck is the guy who identified himself as the Handler; he is crouched behind a boulder, yelling something over and over but there is too much noise to hear. Steve ducks behind another vehicle and tries to ricochet their bullets back at them, but the angle is bad and there’s no goddamn cover. Two of them stop to reload at the same time, and on Steve’s right, the Winter Soldier drops his own empty rifle, and hurls himself across the hood of the truck towards the soldiers, a knife in his hand. Steve doesn’t waste a second this time, throwing himself against Bucky’s back and bringing up the shield, even as bullets start to strike. No way out of this one though, they’re in the middle of the clearing now, back to back. Sitting ducks. 

Then, there’s a crack from behind them, and a HYDRA guy falls screaming, his knee shot out. Sam Wilson, clutching his precious Glock, is staggering out of the smoke like the world’s most overworked guardian angel, and it’s enough of a distraction that Steve manages to knock two of the gunmen back with a shield throw while Bucky deflects a shot with his arm and then shoots a man through the eye. Three left. Sam wings another guy running for cover behind a car and Bucky adds a knife hurled straight through his neck. Two left. Someone is firing at them and Steve deflects the bullets straight back into the man’s chest. He gasps and slumps to the floor. One left. The Handler. 

The Winter Soldier is on him in seconds, slapping the pistol away and closing the metal hand around the man’s throat. The man gasps and gurgles, and then chokes out a last string of something in Russian. Bucky jerks and his hand clenches shut. There is a sort of wet, crunching sound, like frozen meat, and the Handler twitches, gurgles again, and dies. There is silence.

Steve just stands and breathes. They’re alive. The HYDRA soldiers are dead. They made it, somehow. Steve is turning back to Sam who has slumped back down into the grass, when something smashes into him with the force of a truck. His legs buckle and Steve hits the ground on his back, with all Bucky’s weight on his chest. Muscle memory saves his life as his right arm comes up to block a devastating blow from the metal arm which would have cracked his skull. 

“Bucky!” he chokes out, kicking hard and throwing himself to the side to dislodge the other man. “It’s Steve, it’s me, I-” 

And then he catches a glimpse of the Winter Soldier’s face. If he had thought the expression was blank before, back when he was just pretending to be the Soldier, that was nothing. Now he’s like an effigy. A death mask. Bucky is _gone_. The Soldier’s fists crack stone as Steve jerks his head aside at the last second, shooting pains run jagged down his neck, but there’s no time for it. Steve tenses and then kicks forward, throwing the Soldier aside. He lunges to the left, arm outstretched for his shield as the Soldier goes the other way. The Asset reaches its target first, snatching up a discarded pistol. Steve, on his knees, stares as the barrel turns on him. Without hesitation the Soldier pulls the trigger. The gun clicks, empty. The Soldier drops the gun without ceremony and Steve scrambles the last few feet to his shield, snatching it up just as the next gun the Soldier finds fires. The bullets bounce harmlessly off the shield.

“Bucky!” Steve yells again, unable to comprehend that the Handler’s dying words have undone everything they had been working for. One Russian phrase and it’s all over, but he’s not going to stop, will never stop fighting for his friend. “Bucky, please, it’s Steve. You don’t have to-“

The Soldier has dropped the second gun and rips the Ka-Bar out from a corpse’s neck. He launches himself at Steve, and long gone are the finesse and skill of their first fight at the overpass. They are both injured and weak and desperate, and it will take only one mistake for this to end, brutally. Steve glances behind, but Sam has passed out face down and he’s not moving. It will all be over before he comes round again. There is a rushing sound in his ears, and Steve prays he isn’t about to pass out too.

Steve catches the first few strikes with the shield and then, when the next falls, he twists. The metal arm swings forward without the expected resistance and Steve spins, jamming the shield up beneath the Soldier’s arm and wrenching it up. There is a crunching sound and the Soldier grunts in pain; the busted plates have buckled as Steve expected and the arm is frozen. But while Steve is busy watching the knife drop from the stiff metal fingers, the Soldier uses the distraction to plant two fast blows with his real arm; the first catches Steve’s healing jaw and the next jabs hard into a fresh gunshot wound in Steve’s belly that he hadn’t even known was there. Steve falls back as the world goes grey around the edges. The rushing sound grows louder. 

“Bucky,” he chokes out again, struggling up. The Soldier is wrenching the metal arm back into position with a sharp tug on the left wrist and a screech of metal, and then he kicks the knife up into his hand. “Bucky, stop fighting, I don’t want to-” but Bucky is on him again. Steve grits his teeth and kicks hard at the injured place on Bucky’s side; the Winter Soldier lets out an animal cry of pain but doesn’t falter, sending the knife blade skittering across Steve’s ribs in a long slash. Steve stumbles and the Soldier launches blow after blow falling onto the shield until Steve’s hands are numb and slippery with blood and he is losing his grip. 

Steve knows he is going to die. Not because he couldn’t win this fight, but because he won’t. There is only one way to win this, and Steve has already tried living a life without Bucky. He won’t do it again. Bucky won’t hesitate to kill him, but at least he won’t live a life remembering what he’s done. 

The Winter Soldier rips the shield free from Steve’s grasp and hurls it away, and Steve is suddenly on one knee without remembering falling. He manages one last desperate roll, shoving the Soldier aside as he moves, so that the knife strike is thrown off, and the blade slices into Steve’s trapezius rather than his throat. The rushing sound is more of a roar now, like a consuming ocean of black water.

“I’m so sorry, Bucky,” Steve says, and the Winter Soldier covers the ground like frost, and the blade flashes forward for a killing blow. 

The Soldier jerks back as an object smacks hard into his chest. It looks like an arrow. He looks down, dully, and then his whole body starts to convulse as sparks burst from the shaft. 

The Winter Soldier slumps and then collapses to the floor. Steve twists around and finally notices the quinjet dropping into the clearing. Its engines roar in his ears. Through the heat haze of the engine and the coiling smoke of the burning wreck, he sees the lowered ramp and a figure holding a bow. The archer jumps down from the quinjet while it’s still several metres from the ground. Behind, a second jet is circling to land.

Steve ignores them. He scrambles over to Bucky and shoves him onto his back, the electricity dancing up into his own arm. Bucky’s still convulsing and the arrow is sending blue sparks into his chest; Steve rips the arrow out and throws it aside. He shakes Bucky’s shoulders a little but there’s no response. He’s out cold. Steve checks his vitals; breathing normal, pulse fast and weak. He has to get to Sam.

There are voices across the clearing calling orders, and then steps approaching. Steve looks up as Clint Barton jogs over, taking in the scene at a glance. He has his bow out and an arrow to the string, two guns and a knife strapped on his legs, and his personalised earpiece radio. There are two agents at his back, rifles and handguns.

“Hey Cap. Long time, no-“

“What the hell is this?” Steve demands, bewildered and angry. 

Barton crouches and collects his arrow. “You mean this?” he asks, waving it and then shoving it back into his quiver. “It’s a taser-arrow. My own design, of course. Pretty neat, don’tcha think? Non-lethal. Or- do you mean what the hell is _this_ ,” he waves his arms expansively to take in the two quinjets and twenty-strong former-SHIELD armed response unit which are just establishing a perimeter around the clearing. “If you mean _this_ , then it’s called saving your ass. And you’re welcome, by the way. Although, I’ll admit, looks like you’ve done most of the hard work for us. What happened?” 

Barton sounds casual, but he’s staying back, and he is still holding his bow ready. The two agents haven’t lowered their rifles. They’re all watching Bucky. 

“HYDRA,” Steve spits out, still crouched at Bucky’s side, holding his wrist to monitor that thready pulse. He is tired beyond words. “The car, they used a mag grenade...Sam was... Barton, there’s a guy over there, Sam, you have to get to Sam. He’s one of the good guys. He was hurt in the crash...”

“Someone’s already on it,” Barton says, nodding. Steve looks over and sees that yes, two of the SHIELD men crouched over Sam. There’s a medic’s pack and a spinal board beside them. Steve can see Sam’s hands moving. He’s conscious now at least.

Steve breathes out slowly. “How did you find us?” he asks, numbly.

“Tony hacked the HYDRA radios a few hours ago. So they followed you, and we followed them,” Barton says. “Seems like we were almost too late; it looks like a goddamn war zone down here. His doing, I take it?”

“No,” says Steve firmly, and then concedes; “Yes. A little.”

The Winter Soldier seems to take that as his cue and groans. The metal arm twitches. The agents tense behind their gun barrels. 

“Holy shit,” Barton looks impressed. “He’s coming round already? Those arrows pack enough punch to floor a rhino. He really is like you then? The Winter Soldier?”

Steve takes Bucky’s hand and gently marks a circle onto the back with his thumb, round and round and round. Bucky goes quiet. 

“This morning he was crying his eyes out because he thought he was going to be punished for throwing up,” Steve says, his voice hollow and distant even in his own ears. “Now he just crushed a man’s throat with his hands and didn’t even look back. I don’t know what he is anymore.” 

There is a burst of static through the agents’ radios, and then Steve overhears a voice stating that all the enemy agents are dead and there is no sign of further activity in the area. Clint acknowledges, and then nods to the armed men behind him. One of them is carrying magnetic cuffs. 

Steve had known this moment was coming. He had wanted to keep Bucky safe and free so much he’d ended up blinding himself to the fact that they weren’t able to help him like this. They were always going to have to accept the cuffs and Stark Tower and goddamn SHIELD. There aren’t any other choices. But Steve is still not ready.

“You know he wasn’t going to hurt me,” says Steve to Barton, and his voice cracks slightly because it’s a lie, a goddamn lie. “He’s been getting better. Then HYDRA...did something. It wasn’t how it seemed.”

“Yeah, him not hurting you. That’s exactly what that didn’t look like.”

“He’s my friend.”

“He _was_ your friend,” Clint corrects and his tone is bleak but not cruel. “Now he’s a weapon. And weapons kill people. That’s how it is, Steve.”

Steve shakes his head, but he can’t argue. Clint Barton knows better than most.

“You agreed with Tony this morning that it was time for him to come in, for everyone’s well-being,” Barton reminds him. “He’s not in his right mind right now, and frankly, neither are you.” 

Steve appreciates more than he can say that Barton stays back where he is and doesn’t press. Makes this feel more like the choice that is isn’t.

“All right. But I’ll do it,” Steve says, gesturing for the cuffs “He hates being touched.” He takes them from the agent, and the cuffs snap together with a quiet click around Bucky’s wrists. One of the men hands Steve a small device the size of a matchbook. Barton explains that it’s a miniature dampening field that will temporarily block signals to and from the tracker and explosives in the prosthetic arm until Stark can have a better look at it. The agent instructs Steve how to fit it to the arm just below the red star and how to activate it. 

Barton finally lowers his bow. Two more agents arrive with another stretcher, and Steve allows them to load Bucky onto it.

“What day is it?” he asks out loud.

“Uh, Wednesday,” says Barton behind him. “November 3rd. Why?”

Steve starts to laugh then, and he laughs and laughs and can’t stop, because on November 3rd 1943, Steve was in a HYDRA work camp in Nazi-controlled Austria, tearing the shackles off Bucky Barnes’ wrists and looking into his face and swearing to him that he would be free of HYDRA forever. Exactly 70 years later to the day, he is closing those cuffs himself. Bucky is going back to be SHIELD’s prisoner and Steve is letting them take him. It’s tragic. It’s hilarious.

They are carrying Bucky towards the quinjet now, and Steve is determined that he won’t let Bucky out of his sight, not this time. But then all of a sudden, Steve’s strength abandons him in a wave and instead of walking it’s all he can do to stand up. Off to his right Barton’s radio crackles and he asks something but Steve can’t answer, and then Barton is coming over to Steve, looking at him strangely. “Hey, Cap, you oka-- _Shit_ , Cap, maybe you need to sit down before you fall down. In the meantime, I’m just going to put some pressure on _that_ and get the medics over here. About time they started earning their keep. Hey, Morris, could use some help over here!”

Barton seems to be pressing hard onto a bloody hole in Steve’s belly, but Steve barely feels it. He is thinking about the circle, the shield, he drew, round and round, on Bucky’s palm. Rescue and capture; the two November 3rds, 2013 and 1943, pressed together side by side, giving and taking in equal measure. That circle, a closed loop of torment and captivity. Thrown out of their own time, they are to live the same days and the same history over and over, in a fight without an end. A futile war.

Steve falls.

* * *

End of Book One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for coming along on this crazy road trip and I hope you had fun reading. As always, I love feedback of all kinds, so please do enrich me with your thoughts in the comments below!  
> Book 2 of the series is already written and will be posted as soon as it has been beta'd and edited. I look forward to welcoming you all back it goes live when we will fix some shit, break some other shit and generally have a good time.


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